[OPE-L:5678] Re: Re: Response to Fred - 1

[Rakesh Narpat Bhandari <rakeshb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

re 5675

> 3.  whether or not the prices that value-form theory is trying to explain
> are disequilibrium actual market prices (as opposed to Marx's equilibrium
> values and prices of production)?

Fred, I don't think Marx believed in such a thing as equilibrium
values. After all, to argue that the average rate of profit not only
does not negate the law of value but becomes the form in which said
law asserts itself does not commit one to the thesis that market is
ever in the process of settling down on equilibrium values. You will
note here that your equilibrium interpretatation of the law of value
is at odds with Mattick Sr' interpretation of Marx (as well as
Korsch's, Grossmann's and Blake's).

While the political economists understood exchange to be regulated in
long run equilibrium by equal labor time for equal labor time, Marx
critiqued Ricardo for not grasping why implicit in the system of
value--that is in the necessity that individual labor be represented
through the exchange of things as general abstract social labor
way--was not the tendency to equilibrium in exchange but crisis in
accumulation.

Of course Marx's value theoretic analysis of the possibility and
necessity of crisis followed upon his materialist insight that the
overthrow of capitalism could never follow from either the success of
moral or ethical argument, no matter how analytically sound,  or the
fact that all previous modes of production had met their historic
ends.

Yours, Rakesh