David Schweickart, in _Against Capitalism_, shows that you can quite coherently define the surplus produced by a worker in a capitalist economy as the average product of labor minus the marginal product of labor (which is identical with the wage). The rate of exploitation could then be identified as (average product - marginal product)/marginal product. Roemer is more complicated, and presents the full mathematical version of his theory in _General Theory of Exploitation and Class_. The more accessible versions are in a chapter of his edited volume, _Analytical Marxism_ and his textbook, _Free to Lose_. Under Roemer's definition, you are capitalistically exploited if you earn a lower income than you could earn by withdrawing your per capita share of society's productive assets, using them and your labor to generate income. He also shows that, under this definition, wage laborers are exploited and those who possess capital are exploiters. So,it's simply silly to argue that you cannot think coherently about exploitation without reference to value theory.
There are plenty of places you can go for a debunking of value theory. Jon Elster's _Making Sense of Marx_ is as good a place as any. (No, Elster's not a revolutionary, and again, so what?) Ian Steedman's _Marx after Sraffa_ should also do the trick. Or, Sweezy's discussion in _Theory of Capitalist Development_ is quite honest about the limits of Bortkiewicz's quasi-solution to the problem. But if these straightforward demonstrations don't convince you, think of the problem this way. For value accounting to mean anything, you have to be able to translate it into prices, because the world of prices is the only world that affects people. If workers are not exploited in some way calculable in terms of their money wages and the prices they pay for goods, then a value accounting of their exploitation is pointless. If firms' profit rates calculated in terms of prices are unrelated to their profit rates calculated in value terms, then the rate of profit calculated in terms of value [s/(c+v)] is equally pointless. So, to show that value accounting is meaningful, you have to be able to translate values into prices. That is just what Marxists have been unable to do. (If you don't believe me, check out the International Working Group on Value Theory and see how they have tied themselves in knots on this problem). And secondly, since calculations made in terms of value are meaningful only when translated into prices, why bother with calculations done in value terms in the first place?
What I really think is that value theory has become a sort of litmus test for a certain kind of revolutionary socialist: repudiate it and you're not one of us. Those who affirm it can't really do anything with it, but it assures them a place within a certain milieu. That's an ersatz version of revolutionary politics. Bob Brenner's work, whatever one thinks of his conclusions, is a model for what we should be doing: trying to explain what's going on around us rather than trying to shore up old categories.
----- Original Message ---- From: "ymorvan at scss.tcd.ie" <ymorvan at scss.tcd.ie> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Mon, March 14, 2011 8:30:54 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] An Orgy of Speculation?
Dissenting Wren wrote:
> Read John Roemer or David Schweickart and stop being silly.
>
Can you give some article/book titles for this?
I'm one of the poor souls out there still trying to form a solid opinion on Marx's way of thinking about surplus value. My Troskyste (as some French people say) flavored education was challenged by a passage in the book by Gavin Kitching that Shag recommends from time to time (Karl marx and the philosophy of praxis). His argument (roughly) is that Marx used an unnecessary accounting trick on surplus value derived from machines because he thought it made his case stronger.
The people you mention seem to have lost their revolutionary fervor with time, plus I've come to trust Carrol's instincts, so it would be great if you could give references and defend them a bit
Yann
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: c b <cb31450 at gmail.com>
> To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Sent: Tue, March 8, 2011 11:13:02 AM
> Subject: [lbo-talk] An Orgy of Speculation?
>
> Dissenting Wren
>
> -clip-
-clip
>
> The problem with Marx's argument is the assumption that investment in
> constant capital only reproduces value, which is doubly nonsense,
> partly due to the incoherence of the notion of value...
> ^^^^^^^
> CB: If the notion of value is incoherent, how are you defining
> "exploitation" and "rate of exploitation in your previous paragraph ?
>
> ^^^^^
> [NB - I won't respond to any of the objections this may elicit]
>
> ^^^^
> CB: giggles
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