> I think I am getting this Alan. Marxian contradictions are NOT like polar
> opposites that are inseparable such as sides of a coin. And two sides of a
> coin are not like money and commodities, because you can't flip money and
> commodities like you can a flip a coin. Commodities always stay
> commodities,
> and money always stays money. You could however turn a coin over. But then
> you are saying that the Marxian contradiction is frozen and the coin flip
> is
> contingent as shown in No Country for Old Men. But that makes Marx sound as
> if he's not open to the contingencies of history. Something I have always
> feared.
>
Two things, commodities always stay commodities but commodities contain "within" them use-value (which is different for/contingent upon each user), exchange value (which is different depending/contingent on what the other commodity being exchanged is) and abstract Value (the historically very specific average socially necessary labor time required to produce a commodity of that quality/niche). If that's not contingent enough for you then there's the question of the relative level of organization and power of fractions (and the totality) of the working class as well as the relationship between the capitalist core and its less fully capitalistic satellites unevenly and differentially tied to different commodity chains. Furthermore, there is the different regulatory regimes of nation-states and national and international competition between sectors of capital.
> At any rate, on the labor theory of value thing, I still don't get it.
> While
> I do value goods on the market by guessing at their relative labor content,
> I know that their price does not depend on that alone; for example, a good
> bottle of wine will cost me more than another with the same labor content
> if
> it has taken more time to age. I know that the way in which I value goods
> in
> terms of what I am going to pay for them does not depend very much on the
> units of satisfaction I think I'll receive from them--I would not be a
> sharp
> bargainer if I consulted my personal utile calculator if it could even
> count
> up such a thing. Economics seems like it is based on a crazy ideas about
> the
> psychology that people bring to the markets, but the labor theory of
> valuation has a lot of problems.
>
The labor theory of value relates mostly to that average socially necessary labor time tied to the abstraction Value, not the price you have to or are interested in paying... price, while related to Value, is necessarily mediated by all kinds of highly contingent rents (innovation, opportunity, locational, etc., etc., etc.), very little of which has ANYTHING to do with the kinds of behavioral economics/psychology mainstream economics is taking up these days.
Oh give up philosophy and economics, let's go for social justice.
>
> Ahhh, social justice... the heart and soul of Marxism is that it is not
economics, it integrates disciplines subsequently separated in the name of
stabilizing academic hierarchies and professions... Marxism is inextricably
concerned with the good/philosophy, justice/sociology, culture/anthropology,
uneven development/geography and the myriad agencies and contingencies of
change/history.
That's probably why we argue so much among ourselves despite agreeing on a broad broad range of issues.