The meaning and relevance of abstract labor
It is a requirement of methodological individualism1 that explanations in the social or ‘behavioral’ sciences be grounded upon individual choices. What this means is that the reductions must be the result of conscious individual choices.
This does not necessarily mean that there must be a great elector choosing the reductions. What it means is that the process ending in a reduction must be produced by individual choices, even if the result was not the goal of any individual: It can be an unintended consequence of a lot of individual choices. But, at any rate, What is the empirical reality of a reduction? How can it be empirically detected in an economic process? Is there an entity or process that could be identified as a reduction? Moreover, assuming that such an entity or process can be identified, the question arises whether is is relevant in the explanation of some economic process within capitalism.Reductions can be seen as equilibrium wage systems established by a fictitious “market participant” (cf. Arrow and Debreu 1954: 274) through the establishment of a system of equilibrium production prices. Just as equilibrium price systems are not necessarily the price systems observed in the actual state of the market, reductions are not necessarily the profiles of wages actually paid by the firms. The market participant in Marxian economics has enough information to compute an equilibrium production price system which allows the reproduction of the economic process by means of its associated reduction. In the next chapter I shall proceed to define with precision the concept of a Marxian equilibrium, and then to prove its existence.
Note
1 The concept of methodological individualism that I presuppose here is explained in Garcia de la Sienra (2010).
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More on the topic The meaning and relevance of abstract labor:
- Adolfo Garcia de la Sienra. A Structuralist Theory of Economics. New York, USA: Routledge,2019. — 235 p., 2019
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