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On Tue, 19 Aug 1997 17:01:02 MST Michael Williams  
<[log in to unmask]> wrote: 
 
> Anthony Brewer (in a contribution to the defintion of neoclassical 
> economics) said:  
> > (Marx was confused - he tried to abandon Malthusian demographics  
> > but kept the subsistence wage.) 
>  
> This is just wrong. Following Ricardo, Marx explicitly allowed for a 
> systematic 'social, historical and moral element' in the determination of 
> wages. Marx, unlike Ricardo, also discussed this in terms of the market 
> wage rising diverging from the (reproductive) 'value of labour power' 
> over the cycle, and in response to shifts in the balance of class  
> forces. 
> Modern marxists have gone further in incorporating these insights in 
> macrodynamic models of the capitalist economy.[snip] 
 
The remark I made which Michael Williams has picked up was  
telegraphic and, I admit, provocative. It was an aside, which  
was not part of the main argument. Let me spell it out a  
little. Marx certainly asserted that wages had a 'historical  
and moral element'. But bare assertions don't get very far. 
What I would claim is that Marx never provided any coherent  
mechanism which would keep wages at this historically and 
morally determined level. Cantillon, for example, did provide  
a coherent story - people would not marry unless they could 
raise the resulting children at what they regarded as an  
adequate level of living. Here the historical and moral factors have a  
definite behavioural consequence with the required demographic results. 
 
What is, to my mind, the only coherent mechanism Marx provided to 
determine wages in the long run (and it is an interesting and  
significant one) is in Chapter 25 of Vol 1 of Capital. 'Either  
the price of labour keeps on rising, because its rise does not  
interfere with the progress of accumulation ... Or ...  
accumulation slackens  ... the price of labour falls again.'  
'The rate of accumulation is the independent, not the dependent  
variable' etc. My point here is that 'historical and moral'  
factors play no part in this story. If labor productivity is  
rising over time, this mechanism is likely to generate rising  
wages which will leave subsistence behind. There are then two 
options. Either drop all the stuff about the value of labor power 
and the historical and moral element, or define the 'historical  
and moral element' to be whatever wages actually are. 
 
Either way, I would argue that Marx was confused. He took over the  
subsistence wage from the classics, and wanted to keep it (with as many  
'historical and moral' elements as you like), because it fitted his  
notions of value/value of labour power/surplus value, but once he  
dropped the demographics (if he did - it has been claimed that he  
didn't, but I can't find a textual basis for this claim), it was left  
without a basis. 
 
Let me try to be clear (because I know how easy it is to be  
misunderstood in this area). Either wages are determined simultaneously  
with profits, growth rates, etc., as in Ch 25, in which case  
'historical and moral elements' have no role, or wages are determined  
independently and prior to profits etc., as Marx claimed (I think) in  
the discussion of the value of labour power, in which case the  
mechanism has to be explained, and the story of Ch 25 has to be  
abandoned. 
 
Tony 
---------------------- 
Tony Brewer ([log in to unmask]) 
University of Bristol, Department of Economics 
 
 
 
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