Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 13:36:36 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: M-TH: HoPE



I think Hans is placing much toomuch weight on Ian's use of "parable." Had
he used "analogies," which I think captures the sense of his point that
Marx compares capitalism to feudalism and slavery, I think there would not
have been any confusion. By the way, Marx often does argue with parables.
Think of "Robinson on his island" in CI.I.IV, contrasted and compared to
subsistence and communist production.ANyway, I think arguing against
antirealists on this list or m-2 is arguing against straw men. There
aren't any in a full blodded sense. Though Ian does endorse antirealism
about general laws of nature or society if he goes with Cartwright. 

As to value theory. Hans D. says, forget the quantitative version, that's
a mess. The real point is qualitative. Hans' account of this is a little
opaque, or anyway I didn't get it, but Howard and King, who take the same
line, as I understand it, say more or less that stripped of the
price-theoretic aspects, value theory is a way of saying that exploitation
is a real and ineliminable feature of capitalism and of reminding us of
the truth that commodity fetishism obscures, that economic phenomena are
constituted by human action. I agree with this. I defend "value theory" so
understood in my paper "What's Wrong With Exploitation?", Nous, June 1995.

But this "value theory" isn't the quantiattive value theory defended by
the orthodoc Marxian political economists. They defend a labor theory of
value on which: (a) value is embodied labor; (b) the measure of value is
socially necessary abstract labor time, and (c) prices are proportional to
values so understood, at least on the aggregate level. I think this theoey
has been tried and found wanting. Yes, it can be made to fly, shown tobe
consistent, on certain restrictive assumptions. But there are crippling
problems with it, which we have discussed before and will doubtless
discuss again. I do not think that this is a fatal problem for Marxian
economics, largely because I think that most of the main results that
Marxist want can be achieved without this theory. I also am one of the
four writers of whom I know who thinks that MArx himseld did not hold a
quantitative LTV as described, but that's a historical and academic point.

--Justin 





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