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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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