>>1901122interesting point! however, I would disagree that something as important as circularity of reasoning should be diminished to a "not so important problem". It cannot be that the labour ratio is made to equal the price ratio through fudgery: the whole purpose of this theory is to determine price ratios via labour ratios. The irreducibility of the two kinds of labour indicates there must be some other thing, other than labour, which is an equally important determining factor. To explain, we can consider Mill's hedonism argument. It goes something like this:
As a theory of well-being, we will assume that pleasure is all that matters for someone's wellbeing. In other words, well-being is only a function of pleasure, nothing else. This is known as a hedonistic theory of well-being. The common counter-argument is this: if pleasure is all that matters for a good life, then surely someone must be content living, say, 1,000,000 as a pig as opposed to 30 years as a human, because the total amount of pleasure accrued by a pig in 1,000,000 years must surely be greater than a human in 30. Mill counters by saying that we can preserve the hedonistic theory by introduce qualitatively different pleasures, i.e, higher and lower pleasures. Pigs can never experience higher pleasures while humans can, thus in the 30 years we experience these higher pleasures whereas in the 1,000,000 years a pig never can.
Of course, we must remember the original claim: all well-being is a function of pleasure. If we are now distinguishing between different kinds of pleasure, it seems we concede that there must be something other than pleasure which must be making the difference. Alternatively, if higher pleasures are simply equivalent to some ratio of lower pleasures, there must be some number of years where living as a pig would supercede living as a human are we are again forced to choose to live in an immortal pig's body and brain rather than carry out a human existance. Thus, by introducing two qualitatively different kinds of our base unit (pleasure) our theory falls apart: either they are qualitatively different due to some other third thing, or they are actually just multiples of the other.
Of course, it seems Marx chose to go with the "they are just multiples of eachother" path: if we know this cannot be allowed due to circular reasoning, then we ar
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