[OPE-L:5682] Re: Re: Re: Response to Fred - 1

[Rakesh Narpat Bhandari <rakeshb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

re Nicky's 5679

> The existence of the market (a more concrete
> determination of the value-form as mode of association) does *not*
> therefore transcend the contradiction posed by dissociation, but shows
> value that it cannot exist for itself (independently of price).

Yes, Marx's value theory aims from the very first part of Capital 1
to illuminate the contradictions of capitalist production. For Marx
the law of value is not a law of equilibrium, as even Rubin
maintained (Fred doubtless knows that Mattick Sr took issue with
Rubin on this).  Ajit has argued that in the first part Marx works
from a Walrasian problematic; Fred now suggests that Marx had
interest in equilibrium values.  But as we learn in part I,  the
possibility of crisis inheres in the separation or contradiction
between individual and general abstract social labor--it is this
polarization that Marx attempts to lay bare; moreover, the money
commodity (or its symbolic substitutes) having become (as Chris A
recently underlined) value or general abstract social labor
itself--rather than simply a means of circulation or a numeraire--can
under determinate conditions be valued in itself, thereby causing the
networks of generalized commodity trade to collapse.

Yours, Rakesh