I'm not sure whether the high tech industries or what James Galbraith calls the knowledge intensive capital goods industries are the good intuitive examples to show how the labor theory of value explains the magnitude of value added! In the Value Controversy book Steedman points to micro-electronics to suggest how antiquated the labor theory of value has become. And the same could be said of software pricing. Michael Perelman, are you done with the finals I am just beginning?
This may of course be the point: the development of the productive forces is in increasing contradiction with the relations of production, with the organization of social labor by reactions to price divergences from the underlying value of commodities. There are some formulations of such explosive contradictions in the Grundrisse of which Negri and others are quite fond. (Michael P, I think Roman Rosdolsky was working with a copy of the Grundrisse in Detroit in the 50s and 60s when he wrote The Making of Marx's Capital).
To Ted Winslow's question: perhaps computer industry has to sell to wheat and gold sectors because it's not sitting on land/mines to produce itself wheat and gold?
Will have to check out for a while.
Yours, Rakesh -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20061213/e6687d03/attachment.htm>