| This question <33|164-4> overall <33|35> Hans: <29|35>. |
| Question 70: The value of a commodity does not increase if it is made by a slow or inept laborer. Explain carefully why not. Whose decision is it to keep the value of the output of a slow worker below the time actually used for its production? How is it enforced? |
| [34] Hans: The Flavor of Methodological Individualism I think it would have been instructive for LTC to compare his answer [33] with DuckSoup's [25] and my [26], before sending it to the class, and to ask himself why his answer has such a different flavor than the previous ones. It is also a requirement in this class to build on what others have said about the same question; if you don't, your grade suffers. It is easy now to get an overview of the discussion so far by going to the www. Here is again the URL (updated in 2007): |
| http://marx.econ.utah.edu/das-kapital/2007SP/message.htm |
| I am proud how well the web archives are organized, please check them out. |
| But I'd like to say a little more about [33]'s different flavor. For instance, about the question “who enforces this” [33] says that it is enforced by the capitalists, while [25] said that |
| Value is enforced from the surface by the price that the buyers are paying for the average workers commodity. |
| Which is the more basic answer? Marx, who thinks that social relations have their own existence and cannot be reduced to individuals, would consider the explanation by the competition of the commodity traders on the surface of the economy as the more fundamental one. Capitalists insist on speedup for their workers not out of greed but basically because the market forces them to. (Of course, greed helps you to play this role if you are a capitalist.) |
| LTC's different flavor comes from the fact that his argument is individualistic, while I want you to learn in this class to see the social structures underpinning individual behavior. LTC's economics also has nothing to do with the labor theory of value, despite the fact that he copiously cites the Annotations. LTC thinks value is determined by the “quality and scarcity” of the item. And he explains capitalism by human desires: “Individuals and society as a whole insatiably want products now.” And whether one is productive or not depends on how one is viewed. Value depends on consumer's sentiments. Almost every sentence shows that he is fully thinking in terms of mainstream economics. |
| The grade is therefore only a B-. I am still going to become tougher with my grades as the Semester goes on. In the future such complete disregard of Marx's theory, as well as of the earlier answers, will be graded lower than that. |
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