====================== HES POSTING =================== On Tue, 19 Aug 1997 17:01:02 MST Michael Williams <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Anthony Brewer (in a contribution to the defintion of neoclassical > economics) said: > > (Marx was confused - he tried to abandon Malthusian demographics > > but kept the subsistence wage.) > > This is just wrong. Following Ricardo, Marx explicitly allowed for a > systematic 'social, historical and moral element' in the determination of > wages. Marx, unlike Ricardo, also discussed this in terms of the market > wage rising diverging from the (reproductive) 'value of labour power' > over the cycle, and in response to shifts in the balance of class > forces. > Modern marxists have gone further in incorporating these insights in > macrodynamic models of the capitalist economy.[snip] The remark I made which Michael Williams has picked up was telegraphic and, I admit, provocative. It was an aside, which was not part of the main argument. Let me spell it out a little. Marx certainly asserted that wages had a 'historical and moral element'. But bare assertions don't get very far. What I would claim is that Marx never provided any coherent mechanism which would keep wages at this historically and morally determined level. Cantillon, for example, did provide a coherent story - people would not marry unless they could raise the resulting children at what they regarded as an adequate level of living. Here the historical and moral factors have a definite behavioural consequence with the required demographic results. What is, to my mind, the only coherent mechanism Marx provided to determine wages in the long run (and it is an interesting and significant one) is in Chapter 25 of Vol 1 of Capital. 'Either the price of labour keeps on rising, because its rise does not interfere with the progress of accumulation ... Or ... accumulation slackens ... the price of labour falls again.' 'The rate of accumulation is the independent, not the dependent variable' etc. My point here is that 'historical and moral' factors play no part in this story. If labor productivity is rising over time, this mechanism is likely to generate rising wages which will leave subsistence behind. There are then two options. Either drop all the stuff about the value of labor power and the historical and moral element, or define the 'historical and moral element' to be whatever wages actually are. Either way, I would argue that Marx was confused. He took over the subsistence wage from the classics, and wanted to keep it (with as many 'historical and moral' elements as you like), because it fitted his notions of value/value of labour power/surplus value, but once he dropped the demographics (if he did - it has been claimed that he didn't, but I can't find a textual basis for this claim), it was left without a basis. Let me try to be clear (because I know how easy it is to be misunderstood in this area). Either wages are determined simultaneously with profits, growth rates, etc., as in Ch 25, in which case 'historical and moral elements' have no role, or wages are determined independently and prior to profits etc., as Marx claimed (I think) in the discussion of the value of labour power, in which case the mechanism has to be explained, and the story of Ch 25 has to be abandoned. Tony ---------------------- Tony Brewer ([log in to unmask]) University of Bristol, Department of Economics ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]