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Claudio Sardoni wrote
> The fundamental difficulty I see in Marx and, for that matter, in Classics,
> is the problem inherent in the concept of embodied labor. If you want to
> ignore this problem and find in Marx other elements which are useful to the
> understanding of economic dynamics, this is fine but insufficient to claim
> that you have a Marxist theory. As to the generality of discussion, this is
> inevitable in a mailing list and any point, of course, needs further
> qualifications. Though it is useful to throw up ideas or, sometimes,
> intuitions.
Fine. My initial intervention in response to an aside in one of Tony
Brewer's posts was intended to refute the suggestion that there was
not continuing an active and interesting body of work in the Marxist
tradition. Some of this attempts to grapple with the problem of
embodied labour (as does indeed work in other 'surplus' traditions
such as the 'Modern Classicals'), and some, including my own, accepts
that embodied labour is a flawed concept.
As to whether Marx had (or had to have) an embodied labour conception
of value, I do not accept that this is a closed issue. My own current
take is that there is an embodied labour strand in Marx's work
struggling (implicitly) with what we might now call a value-form
approach.
Finally, as to which work is 'Marxist' and which not, I find
demarcation disputes uninteresting at best. Anyone interested in
deciding whether my work is 'Marxist' (or, better, who is just
interested in my work!) may care to visit my homepage
<http://www.mk.dmu.ac.uk/~mwilliam>. There is there a rather rambling
version of a paper on "Why Marx doesn't need a Commodity Theory of
Money" that touches on the embodied labour issue. A rather more
polished version will replace it in the next few weeks.
Nice talking to you Claudio!
Dr Michael Williams
Department of Economics
School of Social Sciences
De Montfort University
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