RE: Re: value vs. price

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

miyachi [SMTP:miyachi9@xxxxxxxxxx]writes:

>Sir Devine, James<

I am not a British lord, but a commoner (a better class of human being,
BTW).

>your definition on price and value is incorrect. price is  false
appearance of a category of value product. <

I wasn't defining price or value. I was making an analogy. I agree that
price is a false appearance of value, except that these "false appearances"
have real existence in the structure of capitalism, and thus affect
individual consciousness and action. (The fact that prices are real is
suggested by the fact that you can't pay for products at value unless
perchance they correspond to prices.)

>Below is from "Capital"

>"The category of cost-price, on the other hand, has nothing to do with
the formation of commodity-value, or with the process of self-expansion of
capital. When I know that of the value of a commodity worth ?600,
five-sixths, or ?500, represent no more than an equivalent of the
capital of ?500 consumed in its production and that it can therefore suffice
only to repurchase the material elements of this capital, I know nothing as
yet either of the way in which these five-sixths of the value of the
commodity, which represent its cost-price, are produced, or about the way in
which the last sixth, which constitutes its surplus-value, was produced. The
investigation will show, however, that in capitalist economics the
cost-price assumes the false appearance of a category of value production
itself." [from volume III of CAPITAL?]<

the way I interpret this is to say that the formation of commodity-value and
the process of the self-expansion of capital are macroeconomic or, better,
macrosocietal phenomena, so that an individual cost-price (a microeconomic
phenomenon) says little or nothing about those issues. I believe a similar
interpretation applies to the other quotes.

Frankly, I don't think we disagree concerning these issues. I am just
looking at them in a different way.

Jim Devine