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In response to my comment: 
>  
> > ... 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. ... 
>  
 
Tony wrote: 
> 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. 
>  
 
 
As to the implications of what Tony originally said, I unreservedly  
apologize for grossly overstating anything that could be inferred  
from it about modern Marxist scholarship. I certainly did not  
intend to be 'dismissive'. I did have in mind some of his published  
work on the subject, that is, as Tony points out, not reducible to  
any such simple sweeping assertion as that which I made. 
 
As to Marx's own work, I have already indicated that I cannot see the  
incompatibility between the two aspects of M.'s theory of wages to  
which Tony has drawn attention. No doubt we can develop this after  
Tony's up-coming editorial. 
 
Finally, in Tony's original post from which this thread branched off,  
I do seem to remember some phrase about the implications for *all*  
'surplus' approaches if Tony's critique of Marx's (and in as much as  
they share the same problems) the Classicals' theory of wages are  
valid  ... ? 
 
Dr Michael Williams  
Department of Economics 
School of Social Sciences 
De Montfort University 
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