"It's not Marx"

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is strictly tangential to my "LTV Defense" postings, but I'm
afraid I can't resist rising to Jim Devine's bait (3/21/94).  Jim says
that while my LTV stuff is "interesting," and possibly even right,
nonetheless it is "not Marx".  Well, at one level it is not supposed
to be "Marx" as such: it is supposed to be a critical, modern
reconstruction of what I find valid and important in Marx's LTV.
But it *is* supposed to be in the spirit of Marx, and so Jim's
remark rankles.  I throw back the charge.  Jim may wish that
Marx had been some kind of "pure" critical social theorist,
uncontaminated by any commitment to a crude Ricardian LTV,
but it just ain't so.  Drawn from among many possible counter-
examples, I offer the following (from Capital, III, Moscow
edition, p. 177): "Whatever the manner in which the prices of
various commodities are first mutually fixed or regulated, their
movements are always regulated by the law of value.  If the
labour-time required for their production happens to shrink, prices
fall; if it increases, prices rise, provided other conditions remain
the same."  Straightforward, no-nonsense, robust stuff.  None of
Jim's malarkey about (so far as I could make out) the
simultaneous determination of price and value in each and every
market transaction: changes in socially-necessary labor-content
are conceptually prior to, and serve to explain, price movements.
When Marx repeats this point, a couple of pages later, it is
bracketed by two positive references to Ricardo.  Come on, Jim,
who is re-writing history here?

==========================
Allin Cottrell
Department of Economics
Wake Forest University
cottrell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(910) 759-5762
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