[lbo-talk] The zen of marx (was clarification)

[Alan Rudy]

Lakshmi:
My feeling is that your understanding of the labor theory of value is not
engaged with Marx's.
Marx's labor theory of value is not subjective, nor an aggregation of
subjective estimations.
Your approach appears to be based on an analysis that stops with exchange
value, where the exchange value of any commodity is determined by the
inter-subjective nature of barter or barter-like exchange.  Marx uses this
approach to describe exchange under pre-capitalist systems but, quite
properly, sees the alienation of producers from the means of production,
from control of the relations of production, from other laborers, from their
prior communities and extended families and from the product radically
transforms the nature of production and exchange such that an abstraction,
Value - not use-value and not exchange-value - determines the value (if not
the exact price) of any particular good.  This took Marx most all of Volume
I of Capital to lay out and was subsequently extended in Volume II and the
incomplete Volume III and the never initiated other two or three intended
volumes.
If you are interested in this stuff, that's where I'd start... doing so will
change your understanding of the labor theory of value (but still not
provide you completeness, as Marx didn't intend it to given the ongoing
acceleration of the expanded reproduction of capital and the attendant
changes in ecological, personal, communal, political and economic
conditions.
Alan

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Lakshmi Rhone <lakshmirhone at gmail.com>wrote:


> Alan
> You're right that there is all this work on behavioral economics. I don't
> know what to make of it. I was only making the simple point that I
> understand the labor theory of value
> as a theory of how people value goods or give meaning to goods in the
> marketplace. So I think it's a subjective theory--or at least a theory of
> aggregated subjective estimations of objective costs-- and I think people
> can't but value judgments without relative judgments or comparisons. That
> is, I figure out how much a hand woven sweater is worth by guessing how
> much
> more time went into it as compared to a machine produced one. If I didn't
> ask that question, I don't know how I would make my own value judgments.
> That people are making such valuations seems beyond obvious but that seems
> to be hugely controversial among economists. So I am willing to say that
> there is some truth to the labor theory of value for a lot of goods, but
> it's obviously not a complete theory. And even if it's approximately
> correct, I don't see what it has to do with making society socially just.
> Do
> we need economics? I think most people have already figured out that we
> don't need economists!
> LR
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> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- 
*********************************************************
Alan P. Rudy
Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
Central Michigan University
124 Anspach Hall
Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
517-881-6319