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This post continues my previous response to Tony Brewer, taking up
what Claudio Sardoni wrote:
> Michael Williams claims that "a surplus over the socially specific
> reproductive requirements of labour is a perfectly well-defined" notion.
> I don't see how this could be possible once the subsistence wage cannot
> be "perfectly defined". Surplus too would become something "vaguely"
> determined.
I do not follow the argument here. A (socially and individually)
acceptable 'living wage' is implicit in much industrial
relations activity as well as most social policy discussion.
'Physical' subsistence is but one component of the
determination of such a wage. My claim is just that Marx's
value-of-labour-power is a useful way of conceptualising
this complex determination. The fact that either the empirical
quantification of such an average wage in any conjuncture and/or its
modelling in dynamic models of capitalist accumulation are difficult
and complex does not make the concept per se less well-defined.
Claudio continues:
> Besides, in talking on this topic, we can't forget all the
> problems related to Marx's (and Ricardo's) labor theory of value. Think
> of Sraffa: he had to abandon the notion of subsistence wage and defined
> the surplus only in physical terms or in price terms, certainly not in
> labor terms.
It is difficult to respond to such a general assertion. Perhaps I
could assume that the 'difficulties' primarily referred to fall under
the ' (end of) Marx after Sraffa' position, collated for UK audiences
in particular in Ian Steedman's 1977 book of (nearly) that title, and
revived more recently in Tony Brewer's editorialising on the alleged
exhaustion of the insights to be gleaned from Marx(ist)'s work?
In which case I can only point to the alternative argument that what
may have come to an end in the mid 1970s was only one particular
interpretation of Marx: that stemming from Tugan-Baranovsky (1905),
through Bortkiewicz (1907), Sweezy (1942), Bohm-Bawerk (1949), and
many others up to and beyond post-Sraffians such as Steedman (1977).
Alongside this strand of post Marx scholarship there were always many
others that focussed not solely on such linear-production modelling
(distortions?) of Marx's arguments, but also on his account of
abstract labour, the value form and commodity fetishism, exemplified
inter alia in I.I. Rubin's 'Essays on Marx's Theory of Value' (Black
and Red, 1972 - I don't have the original publication date to hand.)
The point is that the apparently devastating logical critique of the
coherence of 'Marx''s (actually Tugan-Baranovsky et. seq.'s) theory
of value spawned, alongside the abandonment by some of 'Marxist
Economics', a wide variety of alternative accounts of what Marx said,
or could be interpreted as having said, none of which is
obviously susceptible to the post-Sraffian critique. An indicative
list might include (this is *only* indicative, and neglects many
highly interesting approaches and authors): The 'New Interpretation'
(eg Duncan Foley), the 'Macro-monetary' approach (eg. Fred Moseley),
the 'Temporal Single System' account ( eg., Andrew Kliman and Alan
Freeman), that claims to be more than an interpretation or
development of Marx, claiming rather replication of all of Marx's
significant economic insights without making any changes of substance
to his own texts, the 'Value-form' approaches of, eg Reuten and
Williams (that's me), and many, many others.
Of course, each of these is susceptible to detailed critique, but
none of them is dealt an obvious killer blow by the post-Sraffian
critique, or more specifically by the complication of the
determinants of the wage beyond physiologically defined subsistence.
What is more, some kind of account of the 'exploitation' that is
often thought to underpin the political import of Marxist critique of
political economy (and of modern economics) is maintained in each of
these, and the many other 'post-post-Sraffian' developments in
Marxist thought.
But perhaps I have missed your point?
Dr Michael Williams
Department of Economics
School of Social Sciences
De Montfort University
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