Hacker News Reader

Comment by claudiawerner | Hacker News Reader

The history of value theory is well explained in this paper by economist Alan Freeman: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/48646/1/MPRA_paper_48646.pdf

View on HN

It seems like an ok reading of the history on first glance but it is the Marxist perspective. I suppose necessary to understand the heterodox viewpoint.

> So central to capitalist reality is this motor of growth that it lies behind both imperialist conquest and the launching of those periodic prolonged booms of which the Belle Époque and the post-war Golden Age are the most recent examples.

This is a pretty ridiculous conclusion that is demonstrably false.

I don't know much about the examples myself. I'm interested in why the author is wrong.

Marxist value theory basically died out in the 70s, which Freeman basically concedes in the "The Marxists Divide" section. His TSSI is an attempt to resusitate the theory, but it has found few adherents.

It is worth noting that the TSSI isn't the only one around any more, though - nor is the strictly quantitative interpretation of value theory. The TSSI was constructed as an interpretation to solve the transformation problem, but there's Dumenil's New Interpretation now and Fred Moseley's Macro-Monetary Interpretation. It is not surprising that Freeman would make such a concession as an economist rather than as a philosopher, where Marxian value-form theory flourished in Germany and Japan during the 70s and 80s and still to this day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com