| This question <53|65> overall <57|59> Pheymboh: <1387|563>. graded B |
| Question 92: Regarding the question how to measure the quantity of value, Marx first gives a wrong answer, which is based on an oversight, and then corrects it. Why doesn't he give the right answer right away? |
| [58] Pheymboh: Marx wants to add weight to the importance of his final development of the argument, and is therefore presenting the logical pieces of this argument in such an order as is required to bring in the paramount item at the end, to wrap it all up and give it all meaning. This final item is the presentation of ‘labor-power’ as a conceptual substance. |
| He wants the idea of ‘labor-power’ to stay with us, and make functional the new philosophy that he hopes we now have a clear perception of. His philosophical system is one of ‘commodity value’ determination that I don't expect he would like to implement as a legal determination of price, but as a method for economists to analyze the worth of governmental, economic policies regarding the payment of laborers. He is not asking us to adopt absolutes about wage polices (and I acknowledge that he does not address wage policy directly, but that is what his material will ultimately affect if it's implemented by policy makers), such as the absolute that he started the whole argument with, the ‘labor-time’ method of determining commodity value. |
| Simply counting the hours of work put into a product and multiplying by a constant would be a very blind, absolutist way of determining price, and he's admitting it up front, so that the rest of his argument, the part that matters to him, sounds like a reasonable solution. While he would like the amount of time spent on the commodity to be rewarded without question, he's mostly concerned with giving all people a shot at making a fair, average, comfortable living. Fairness would hopefully be guaranteed if their reward were based on the amount of ‘labor-power’ they spend in production. Marx is assuming that everybody has labor-power to spend, and that they should all have the opportunity to spend it in a way that sustains them. |
| Hans: Very well written and convincing sounding, but unfortunately based on a serious misunderstanding of Marx's goals in writing Capital |
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