No. That because they don't correspond, we get capitalist crises. See David Harvey, Limits to Capital (Chicago, U.C.Press, 1982), p.68, on why price discrepancies from underlying values are one cause of false investment signalling, disproportionalities and general overaccumulation crisis.
"The fetishism that arises out of the transformation from value into prices of production plays a crucial role in Marx's argument. It performs an obvious ideological and apologetic function at the same time as it mystifies the origin of profit as surplus value. Such a mystification is dangerous for capital because the reproduction of the capitalist class depends entirely upon the continuous creation and recreation of surplus value. But even if the capitalists could penetrate beneath the fetishism of their own conception, they would still be powerless to rectify a potentially serious state of affairs. Competition forces them willy-nilly to allocate social labour and to arrange their production processes so as to equalize the rate of profit. What Marx now shows us is that this has nothing necessarily to do with maximizing the aggregate output of surplus value in society. We find in this a material basis for that systematic misallocation of social labour, and that systematic basis in the organisation of the labour process, that lead capitalism into periodic crises. Competition necessarily leads individual capitalists to behave in such a way that they threaten the very basis for their own social reproduction. They so behave because the logic of the market forces them to respond to prices of production rather than to the direct requirements for the production of surplus value. This is the crucial insight that arises out of a study of the transformation problem."
Yours, Patrick *************************************************** Patrick Bond 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 Johannesburg, South Africa phone: (2711) 614-8088 email: pbond at wn.apc.org office: University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development Management PO Box 601, Wits 2050 phone (o): (2711)488-5917; fax: (2711) 484-2729 email (o): bondp at zeus.mgmt.wits.ac.za