Re: theoretical soup

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>


If I remember correctly, Robinson interpreted Marx's law of value as a
Ricardian labor theory of price. Given that assumption (i.e., that the point
of values was to explain price), _of course_ she should have rejected it.
That's an important reason to reject that misinterpretation, the basis of
almost all criticisms of Marx's heuristic. (Weirdly, that misinterpretation
is shared both by most critics of Marx's law of value and also by many
"fundamentalists." They then feed each others' misconceptions.)

===================

So KM set lot's of folks on a Humean constant conjunction wild goose chase with:

Magnitude of value expresses a relation of social production, it expresses the connexion that
necessarily exists between a certain article and the portion of the total labour-time of society
required to produce it. As soon as magnitude of value is converted into price, the above necessary
relation takes the shape of a more or less accidental exchange-ratio between a single commodity and
another, the money-commodity. But this exchange-ratio may express either the real magnitude of that
commodity's value, or the quantity of gold deviating from that value, for which, according to
circumstances, it may be parted with. The possibility, therefore, of quantitative incongruity
between price and magnitude of value, or the deviation of the former from the latter, is inherent in
the price-form itself. This is no defect, but, on the contrary, admirably adapts the price-form to a
mode of production whose inherent laws impose themselves only as the mean of apparently lawless
irregularities that compensate one another.

The price-form, however, is not only compatible with the possibility of a quantitative incongruity
between magnitude of value and price, i.e., between the former and its expression in money, but it
may also conceal a qualitative inconsistency, so much so, that, although money is nothing but the
value-form of commodities, price ceases altogether to express value. Objects that in themselves are
no commodities, such as conscience, honour, &c., are capable of being offered for sale by their
holders, and of thus acquiring, through their price, the form of commodities. Hence an object may
have a price without having value. The price in that case is imaginary, like certain quantities in
mathematics. On the other hand, the imaginary price-form may sometimes conceal either a direct or
indirect real value-relation; for instance, the price of uncultivated land, which is without value,
because no human labour has been incorporated in it.

< http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm >