A note on ‘Labour value and socialist economic calculation’
Cockshott and Cottrell have reopened a debate which has been engaged with vigour in the past, but, as they rightly point out, needs to be reassessed in the light of current technology. They describe their ideas as being ‘work in progress’, and this note attempts to retain this spirit. While differing on technical matters, it emphasises the need for such a reassessment and discusses some further possibilities. A number of different issues are addressed in their paper: these include the use of labour values as a tool in economic planning and the computational feasibility of such a process. Formal definitions are given using a computer orientated notation.1 This note separates the issue of the impact of increasing computing power on the feasibility and desirability of computing a central plan from the issue of using Marxian labour values as a method of calculation. Much of what Cockshott and Cottrell say is related to a wide body of literature in mainstream economics, but whose mathematical nature has given ...