====================== HES POSTING =================== This post continues my previous response to Tony Brewer, taking up what Claudio Sardoni wrote: > Michael Williams claims that "a surplus over the socially specific > reproductive requirements of labour is a perfectly well-defined" notion. > I don't see how this could be possible once the subsistence wage cannot > be "perfectly defined". Surplus too would become something "vaguely" > determined. I do not follow the argument here. A (socially and individually) acceptable 'living wage' is implicit in much industrial relations activity as well as most social policy discussion. 'Physical' subsistence is but one component of the determination of such a wage. My claim is just that Marx's value-of-labour-power is a useful way of conceptualising this complex determination. The fact that either the empirical quantification of such an average wage in any conjuncture and/or its modelling in dynamic models of capitalist accumulation are difficult and complex does not make the concept per se less well-defined. Claudio continues: > Besides, in talking on this topic, we can't forget all the > problems related to Marx's (and Ricardo's) labor theory of value. Think > of Sraffa: he had to abandon the notion of subsistence wage and defined > the surplus only in physical terms or in price terms, certainly not in > labor terms. It is difficult to respond to such a general assertion. Perhaps I could assume that the 'difficulties' primarily referred to fall under the ' (end of) Marx after Sraffa' position, collated for UK audiences in particular in Ian Steedman's 1977 book of (nearly) that title, and revived more recently in Tony Brewer's editorialising on the alleged exhaustion of the insights to be gleaned from Marx(ist)'s work? In which case I can only point to the alternative argument that what may have come to an end in the mid 1970s was only one particular interpretation of Marx: that stemming from Tugan-Baranovsky (1905), through Bortkiewicz (1907), Sweezy (1942), Bohm-Bawerk (1949), and many others up to and beyond post-Sraffians such as Steedman (1977). Alongside this strand of post Marx scholarship there were always many others that focussed not solely on such linear-production modelling (distortions?) of Marx's arguments, but also on his account of abstract labour, the value form and commodity fetishism, exemplified inter alia in I.I. Rubin's 'Essays on Marx's Theory of Value' (Black and Red, 1972 - I don't have the original publication date to hand.) The point is that the apparently devastating logical critique of the coherence of 'Marx''s (actually Tugan-Baranovsky et. seq.'s) theory of value spawned, alongside the abandonment by some of 'Marxist Economics', a wide variety of alternative accounts of what Marx said, or could be interpreted as having said, none of which is obviously susceptible to the post-Sraffian critique. An indicative list might include (this is *only* indicative, and neglects many highly interesting approaches and authors): The 'New Interpretation' (eg Duncan Foley), the 'Macro-monetary' approach (eg. Fred Moseley), the 'Temporal Single System' account ( eg., Andrew Kliman and Alan Freeman), that claims to be more than an interpretation or development of Marx, claiming rather replication of all of Marx's significant economic insights without making any changes of substance to his own texts, the 'Value-form' approaches of, eg Reuten and Williams (that's me), and many, many others. Of course, each of these is susceptible to detailed critique, but none of them is dealt an obvious killer blow by the post-Sraffian critique, or more specifically by the complication of the determinants of the wage beyond physiologically defined subsistence. What is more, some kind of account of the 'exploitation' that is often thought to underpin the political import of Marxist critique of political economy (and of modern economics) is maintained in each of these, and the many other 'post-post-Sraffian' developments in Marxist thought. But perhaps I have missed your point? Dr Michael Williams Department of Economics School of Social Sciences De Montfort University ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]