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On Tue, 2 Sep 1997 15:52:30 MST Michael Williams  
<[log in to unmask]> wrote: 
 
> ... 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. ... 
 
I would like to put on record that I did not make the suggestion that  
seems to be attributed to me here. In the posting concerned, I said  
nothing about continuing work in the Marxist tradition. I have said a  
fair bit about it elsewhere, but I wouldn't want it to be summarized in  
such simple and dismissive terms. My remarks were about Marx himself,  
not his successors, and were directed only to the question of the  
consistency of Marx's wage theory. In my view, Marx's definition of the  
value of labour power in terms of subsistence requirements (with a  
'historical and moral element'), which plays a fundamental role in his  
theory of surplus value, is inconsistent with, or at least not based on  
or connected to, what he himself said elsewhere about the way in which  
wages are actually determined. That is a judgement about the history of  
economics, not about modern work of any description. 
 
Tony Brewer ([log in to unmask]) 
University of Bristol, Department of Economics 
 
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