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Sraffa - is this true?
Source Jim Devine
Date 08/10/16/07:36

Gil Skillman wrote:
> >... Ricardo didn't have a labor theory of value,
> > he had a prices-of-production theory of value
> > which reduces to a particular version of the labor theory of the value
> > [i.e., that equilibrium commodity price ratios = corresponding labor value
> > ratios] for the special cases that the rate of profit is zero or capital
> > intensities of production are equal across industries;

it depends on what one means by a "labor theory of value" doesn't it?
as far as I know, there has never been a general agreement about what
that term means. On the other hand, Ricardo did seem to have a "97
percent labor theory of price." That is, he used relative labor
contents to predict relative prices while knowing that there were
major exceptions (short-term dynamics, non-produced goods, etc.)

what exactly is a "theory of value"? or a _labor_ theory of value.
It's possible, I'd guess to have a "labor theory of value" of the sort
that Marx did (seeing property income as solely the result of labor
done beyond that needed to reproduce labor-power at the level of
capitalism as a whole) without embracing a labor theory of price
(seeing relative prices as easily derivable from relative labor
contents).

(by the way, it's possible to have relative money prices equal to
relative labor contents without zero rate of profit or uniform
"capital intensities" if the profit rates and "capital intensities"
are correlated in exactly the right way.)

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