(with scholarly courtesy, leading up to this distinction)
>That is, your interpretation makes it impossible for you to explain why
>Marx says there are two reasons why the value and price of production of a
>commodity differs.
I have found Shane Mage's recent references to Marx concise, pertinent and non-dogmatic. I assume that his quotation from Heraclitus in the signature line is a signal of the importance of dialectics in interpreting all this. Everything is in flux. Everything is connected with everything else.
I would say the way Rakesh introduces the objection, is looking for just one or possibly two mechansism by which there may be a divergence between value and price. Maybe it is sloppy of me, and I will rightly be guided back to the precise texts, but I assume that price equilibriates around value as a result of a whole range of interactions,
>To put it yet another way: In construcing the tableaux Marx had forgotten
>his fundamental principle that value relations cannot treated as if they
>are observable and directly measurable.
I assume the confusion is that people forget the sharp contrasts involved in Marx's method of abstraction. Although he illustrates principles with simple figures in Volume 1 of Capital, and he concretises the issues by talking of bales of cotton from as early as Wage Labour and Capital (1847) these are numerical metaphors for abstractions. They are not in themselves the sum total of the concrete reality.
In fact I note that the way Marx gets concrete as early as the fourth paragraph of Capital Vol 1 is by pointing out that "When treating of use-value, we always assume to be dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron." He then of course, builds up a detailed discussion of how use values relate to one another. The price existing at any one time is the result of the interaction of innumerable psychosocial assumptions of what is considered useful by comparison with what else.
Unless s/he approaches Marx from a dialectical point of view, the reader is always at risk of getting bogged down in a mechanical understanding, when Marx tries to illustrate abstract principles with a concrete metaphor.
As Marx said in Wage Labour and Capital, "The total movement of this disorder is its order".
How very like modern concepts of chaos theory.
Value is a strange attractor, and it too is always in flux.
Chris Burford
London