Re: Re: RE: Re: : Premises, Circularities

[Rakesh Bhandari <rakeshb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

So Ian seems to have taken Blaug's word for it.

> I took this to mean that the quest to get a price theory out of KM's
> theory of value was a mistake.

Marx was not interested in an equilibrium price theory (Mattick's
chapters in Marx and Keynes are good as are Korsch's chapters in Karl
Marx). He was interested in showing, contra Malthus, the formation of
an average rate of profit not only does not contradict the law of
value its magnitude can in fact be explained on the basis of surplus
social labor time extracted by the capitalist class from the working
class.

Marx criticizes Ricardo for taking an average rate of profit as a
given and then attempting to save the law of value in spite of it.
This led to disaster in the works of Ricardo's followers
(MacCullough, sp.?). Marx attempts to develop the average rate of
profit and thereby the price of production step by step out of the
law of value itself.

But this conceptual development has unforseen consequences: it turns
out the proletariat is exploited as a class by the bourgeoisie as a
class.

For expressed in this thing--the price of production--is the growing
antagonism between the two major classes, an antagonism raised to the
level of society as a whole.

This is obviously not a price theory, but a theory of revolutionary
social contradictions which can be grasped by the working masses.
And this is why there will be no retreat from attacks on Marx's so
called transformation procedure; the stakes are much too high.

There is also a further development of the SNALT, as Mattick Jr has
pointed out.
Price of production is of course a transformation of value, for we
find that in a bourgeois society, no commodity is produced unless
capitals can receive (tendentially) the average rate of profit by
doing so. The price of the production is a socially necessary
condition for its supply.  That the social labor time that a
commodity has to represent is given by price of production rather
than its value reveals capital as a collective social power, as each
capitalist participates proportionally in the total social capital
which as Marx wryly observed makes communists out of the capitalists.

But at the same time Marx is clear that prices at best oscillate
around these prices of production because every step towards the
equalisation of profit rates is disrupted by a step away.



> In quoting KM I was pointing to that section of Capital which seems
> to be what led many commentators
> to start their explorations of the causal relationship[s], if any,
> between values and prices.

Yes the causal relationship is that non wage income is limited by the
surplus social labor time extracted from the working class as a class
in the process of production, though of course not all value and
surplus value will be necessarily realized due to
disproportionalities, underconsumptionism being one form thereof.



> Since
> those relationships are empirical they are in constant conjunction,
> issues of non-equilibrium,
> non-linearity, convergence and divergence aside, no? If they're not
> in constant conjunction how can
> any quantitative model even get started to track the dynamics so
> that the results can serve as data
> in need of explanation?


well what's wrong with Marx's simple transformation tables. They show
how the value extracted from the working class (v+s) can be
distributed in such a way as to erase from bourgeois consciousness
the collective exploitation of the working class and give rise to the
fetishism of capital. Samuelson's eraser theorem is the correlative
of the fetishism of capital.


> To that extent KM was caught up in Ricardo's quest for an invariance
> condition/measure for the
> theory of value.

Please Ian, Marx spends pages arguing that Ricardo's quest was bound
for failure, though as a purely methodological device in his theory
he assumes the constant value of money, thereby ensuring that all
changes in price happen on the commodity--rather than the money--side
of the equation.

Rakesh


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