Kliman responds

Chris Burford cburford at gn.apc.org
Wed Feb 7 16:14:32 PST 2001


At 16:55 07/02/01 -0600, you wrote:
>Well, never say it can't be done until you've seen how someone proposes to
>do it, I suppose, but HOW does Marx's derivation of price from value work
>if you remove the equilibrium constraint? All Marx did in Vol. III was
>postulate a set of prices for a commodity and derive value as the mean
>price. But, of course, you need to run the chain in the opposite
>direction if you want to show that price depends on value, not vice
>versa. I won't say that the transformation problem can't be solved, but
>as far as I know it hasn't been yet, and I still don't see where this line
>of inquiry leads.
>
>Michael McIntyre

It is clear that a growing body of committed left wing economists have been pursuing a non-equlibrium approach to value theory.

However when I saw Doug's clipping I too wondered what sense the distinction between equilibrium and non-equilibrium makes in lay terms.

Alan Freeman's article in Capital and Class, Summer 1995, only partially illuminates this for me, by explaining developments within the history of left wing economics, using specialist concepts.

He attributes the progressive direction (page 50) to two sources which he terms sequential and nondualistic.

"The sequential view originates in the neglected tradition of 'iterative' solutions to the transformation problem."

"... the idea of transformation as a *sequence* of intermediate prices converging - if technology does not change - on the simultaneous solution, the input prices for each step being the output prices of the previous step."

However "Non-dualists, work with simultaneous, equal-profit-rate systems..."

"A growing minority [including Freeman and Kliman] unites these two insight, dispensing entirely with the mainstream synthesis. ... Neither insight makes sense without the other. The nondualists restore Marx's conception that values emerging from production are transformed in circulation, and that the resultant prices form the basis for new values in production. But these changes follow one another *in time*; prices are not the basis of the same set of values as before but a new and later set. Divorced from this fact, the argument either appears as an obscure philosophical diatribe or branches off into the radically false idea that money is the sole measure of value."

"It provides a rigorous foundation for explaining technological change in a money economy."

IMO this needs a still pithier lay explanation. Perhaps that will be explored at the Brecht Forum.

If so, feedback please.

Chris Burford

London



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