Charles Brown I agree with you that it is empirically testable that way. Ironically, it _is_ testable through prices, as you say.
Commenter: A neoclassical economist would tell you that he agrees with that capital cannot be productive without labour, but that the opposite is (more or less) true too, i.e. that labour would be less productive without capital. Hence, each gets its share according to the relative marginal physical product of both. This is all more or less verifiable right?/////
CB: Yes, and of course, Marx deals with this empirically. With "capital" here , I believe what you are referring to is in Marxist terms "instruments of production", part of the "means and forces of production". Marx explains at length how instruments of production increase the productive power of labor. However, the instruments of production are almost never produced through the labor and activities of the capitalist. Rather , the capitalist buys them from another capitalist. And the capitalist is reimbursable for the cost of the instruments of production. That's all. The instruments do not add any new value that was not already in them from the people who made them. Perhaps the latter is the metaphysical concept. Maybe we should look at the matter a little more closely (smiles)
At the core of Marxism is the metaphysical principle, a humanist metaphysical principle, that what is valuable to humans is uniquely creatable by humans.
Marxist metaphysical or first assumption: Tools and machines cannot add any humanly valuable something to humanly valuable products and services. This is especially clear with respect to service-commodities.
I think the Marxist empirical project here would involve doing 24 hour videos of the activities of capitalists and workers of an enterprise over a six month period. Then analyze the videos as to what they add to the product. Is the capitalist's activities really adding so much more per time than the activities of the workers ? That's the general study format for Marxist economic sociologists empirical study of this question.
On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 7:10 AM, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
>
> Recently, I've been reading economist Joan Robinson's 1962 book, Economic Philosophy (http://digamo.free.fr/ecophilo.pdf).
>
> In that book, she seemed to undertake a critique of the foundations of neoclassical economics that, seems to me, unlike the one that Ernst Mach undertook of Newtonian physics in his book, The Science of Mechanics. Just as Mach attempted to expose the metaphysical assumptions that had been uncritically accepted in Newtonian physics, Robinson attempted to similarly expose the metaphysical assumptions that were uncritically accepted by neoclassical economists. Like Mach, she thought that exposing these assumptions as being metaphysical was sufficient grounds for rejecting them, since they were not testable, but were reflective of the ruling ideologies in society, and in her opinion, constituted obstacles to the advance of economic science. As she put it, " Economics limps along with one foot in untested hypotheses and the other in untestable slogans." In drawing distinctions between science and metaphysics, she drew heavily upon Karl Popper, with his falsiafiability criterio!
> n. Yet, this usage of Popper seems to me to be a good example of the creative misuse of a thinker's ideas. Popper himself was not particularly anti-metaphysical. In fact he took the logical positivists to task precisely on that point. And my impression of Popper is that he no objections as such against the use of metaphysical assumptions within science. So Robinson's program in regards to economics seems much more in tune with those of the logical positivists than it is with Popper's own programs. BTW Karl Popper was longtime friend of Friedrich Hayek, although considered himself to be a socialist or a social democrat for most of his adult life.
>
> This BTW seems also to have been the reason why Joan Robinson abjured the label of Marxist, even though she greatly admired Marx. For her to be a Marxist required accepting the labor theory of value and dialectical materialism. As a good English empiricist she rejected both as metaphysics. In that regards, it's interesting to compare Joan Robinson's discussion of the debate over the labor theory of value in Economic Philosophy with Sidney Hook's discussion of this in his book, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx. They actually both agreed that the theory was metaphysical in nature. That is, that is not empirically falsifiable. And they also agreed that the major supporters and critics of the LTV, both concentrated on debating the metaphysical aspects of the theory. Hook, however, at least in 1933 proposed hanging on to the theory despite the fact neither it, nor the alternatives to it proposed by the marginalist economists could be empirically confirmed or disconfirmed,!
> arguing that:
>
> ". . . the self-conscious theoretical expression of the practical activity of the working class engaged in a continuous struggle for a higher standard of living - a struggle which reaches its culmination in social revolution. . . To the extent that economic phenomena are removed from the influences of the class struggle, the analytical explanations in terms of the labor theory of value grow more and more difficult. The labor theory of value is worth saving if the struggle against capitalism is worth the fight."
>
> Robinson, on the other hand, seems to have thought that we could retain all that worth retaining in Marx without having to hold on to metaphysical theories like this. Not unlike her contemporary, Oskar Lange, she believed that Marx's theory of exploitation could be restated without making use of the labor theory of value.
>
>
> Jim Farmelant
> http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
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