Re: Which Marxism? (fwd)

On Sun, 6 Jun 1999, elson wrote:

>I'm not sure exactly what you refer to by production for exchange-values.  I
>suspect you mean labor as a commodity.  But for KM labor power had an
>exchange value (for the seller) and a use value (for the buyer) only with
>the wage labor form of commodified labor, and his focus was on the factory
>form of wage labor.

Labor-power is an exchange-value for the laborer, sure. But commodities in
general are exchange-values. Capitalists find labor-power useful because
they produce exchange-values with it. We are not discussing here only the
labor market, but the capitalist market generally.

>So I don't think he was correct.  Indeed, there has been a long and
>ongoing debate about why small commodity production persists within the
>core areas -- a conundrum from the orthodox Marxist view

I don't think it is a conundrum. But the point is irrelevant, since small
commodity production is production of exchange-values. And under
capitalism it is capitalist production

>As for subsumption of other forms, I completely agree, and the intro to the
>Grundrisse is very interesting in this respect, don't you think?

Yes I do.

Andy