===================== HES POSTING ==================== 
 
I don't think Michael missed my point. Rather, he gave the expected  
response from somebody who believes that Marxism as a whole is a viable  
theoretical approach to understand economic and social dynamics. To this my  
response is that your arguments, though sometimes useful, do not take  
account of a fundamental aspect. Marx wanted to construct a scientific  
theory of society. For this he needed a rigorous theory of labor value, and  
a rigorous theory of wages. Very general observations on the standard of  
living, the abstract nature of labor, etc. etc., though interesting and  
maybe innovative, did not suffice. To his purpose there must be a strict,  
rigorous and identifiable link between the quantity of embodied labor and  
relative prices. I don't think Marxists today can escape all this and  
pretend that a coherent solution of Marx's difficulty doesn't have any  
implication for them. 
 
Claudio Sardoni 
 
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