===================== 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 ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]