Abstract
In the following ten sets of questions and answers, I intend to give a concise account of the theory of value as it is conceived in the dialectic of capital, i.e., the Marxian economic theory which the late Professor Kozo Uno (1897–1977) developed as a dialectical system. Members of the Uno School, may not be unanimous in what they consider to be the gist of Uno’s value theory. What follows should, therefore, be understood to represent my own interpretation of it. Hence the indefinite article in this essay’s title.
A shorter version of this paper was published in Science and Society, XLVIII (1984), pp. 419–32. The present version considerably expands on it, and adds a number of numerical examples.
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Notes and References
The problem goes back to the classical school, whose labour theory of value was described to be only about 93% a labour theory of price. (See the well known article by G.J. Stigler: “Ricardo and the 93 Per Cent Labour Theory of Value”, The American Economic Review, XLVIII (1958)
For the argument that “scarcity” does not explain the cause of prices, see Thomas T. Sekine, “The Necessity of the Law of Value”, Science and Society, XLIV (1980), p. 294.
See Kozo Uno, Principles of Political Economy, Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1980, pp. 32–4, note 2.
For details see my “Pricing of Commodities”, York Studies in Political Economy, IV (1985), pp. 97–121.
P. A. Samuelson, “Wages and Interest: A Modern Dissection of Marxist Economic Models”, The American Economic Review, XLVII (1957), pp. 181–219.
In the absence of this constraint, the solution of the price system requires the unreasonable assumption that the workers are paid in physically prescribed wage-baskets with no option to retrade their contents, i.e., that they are paid “fodder” instead of money wages. Such an assumption which in effect reduces labour-power to an intermediate good, and renders the distinction between “variable” and “constant” capital irrelevant is incompatible with the presuppositions of the dialectic of capital. See Thomas T. Sekine, “The Transformation Problem, Qualitative and Quantitative”, York Studies in Political Economy, VI (1985), pp. 60–96.
Confirm that α = 2.3683 makes total value equal to total price, i.e., qxX + qyY + qzZ = 270 = ρxX + ρyY + ρzZ. The following discussion, however, does not depend on this particular choice of the “postulate of invariance”, so called by F. Seton in his “The Transformation Problem”, The Review of Economic Studies, XX (1957), pp. 149–60.
Thomas T. Sekine, “The Law of Market Value”, Science and Society, XLVI (1983), pp. 420–44.
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© 1995 Robert Albritton and Thomas T. Sekine
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Sekine, T.T. (1995). Uno School Seminar on the Theory of Value. In: Albritton, R., Sekine, T.T. (eds) A Japanese Approach to Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23817-0_2
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