>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 11/26/2007 4:28 PM >>>
On Nov 26, 2007, at 4:06 PM, Seth Ackerman wrote:
> Even Kliman says he makes no claim that his TSSI interpretation is
> actually a correct description of the world, only that it's
internally
> consistent.
You could say the same of a paranoid's logic, and I'm entirely serious. It's usually internally consistent - it's just untethered from reality.
Doug
^^^^ CB: I know you are talking about Kliman, but ultimately in all this I think Kliman is correct to defend Marx , and I wouldn't say that Marx's discussion of value is untethered from the reality, even of today.
Marx's basic approach just discusses basic elements of the productive relations that are somewhat undeniable. Somebody has to do something to create all the goods and services of "the economy", of each business enterprise. Most of the use and money (exchange) value created in these billions of acts comes logically from these activities. The raw materials they use also add value to the good or service. And it is logical to move the look with the same frame back to the enterprise from whence the raw materials came to analyze the sources of value there.
The sale of the good or service is going to have a price that includes paying all the people who did work going back up the trail of productive enterprises.
Now you can say the owners of the enterprises, who do very little or none of the work to produce goods and services, either add on some to the price or that the owners' takes come out of what should go to pay the people who do the work or most of the productive work. Marx analyzes it as the latter.
If one focuses on the source of value, of goods and services, all this is , I don't know, sort of self-evident for anyone who has lived in and witnessed modern economic relations. Capitalist economists can't really deny that it is basically true. It's something of a consistent application of the truth that nothing comes from nothing. Commodities and services don't fall out of thin air. Some _person_ has to be majorly involved in making them. As to raw materials, their "source" might be the earth, nature, but some_body_ has to go get them for them to be useful to humans.
That's reality, very real, regardless of whether precise prices can be derived from this fundamental picture in any given specific case. The prices are likely to be proportionally organized based on the above elements, ordinal values of labor times and prices are likely to be proportionally related as in Marx's theory, even if not cardinal values of labor times and prices are not.
Then there's the longer term historical hypothesis, especially elaborated and discussed historically by Engels, that commodities down through the ages have been traded based on the labor input to them - the law of value. Engels seems to think this goes right back to the first commodity exchanges at the dawn of swivilization, ( currently placed at 14-12,000 years ago or so). There are some specifics to the capitalist value relations as a part of the historically longer termed commodity form; capitalism is a species of the genus "commoditus"