CB
From: "Drewk" <Andrew_Kliman at msn.com> To: "Chris Burford" <cburford at gn.apc.org> Subject: RE: Kliman responds/value theory Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2001 02:22:43 -0500
In reply to Michael McIntyre: He wrote: "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 ...." I think this description is just plain wrong. See Ch. 9 of _Capital_, Vol. III: Marx took given values and value components as his *data*, and from these data computed the prices that would exist if profit rates were equalized. So the chain runs in the correct direction. Once one repudiates the bizarre premise that input and output prices must be equal, the transformation problem doesn't need to be solved because THERE IS NO PROBLEM TO BEGIN WITH.
In reply to Brad Mayer: I definitely consider Guglielmo (Mino) Carchedi's work to be part of the Copernican Revolution in Marxian value theory. Mino is a proponent of the same general interpretation of Marx's value theory (the temporal single-system interpretation) that Alan Freeman and I share and will be discussing in two weeks.
In reply to Chris Burford: Hi, Chris. The basic explanation I would give -- I can't presume to speak for Freeman -- of why temporalism (sequentialism) matters is this. When one postulates that prices (and values) are in "equilibrium" -- i.e., when one constrains input and output prices (and values) to be equal -- value is no longer a *determinant* of anything. Everything seems to be determined by "physical quantities" -- value and price are just "veils" that mask the "underlying" physical relations. In short, what one is left with is vulgar materialism. The antagonism between use-value and value, that is the differentia specifica, and Achilles heel, of the capitalist system is annulled. For instance, the physicalist doctrine is very much like the New Economy nonsense -- rising productivity can supposedly solve all the system's problems -- since physicalism maintains that greater productivity implies greater profitability. This *would be* true if values (and thus prices, ceteris paribus), did not tend to decline as a result of rising productivity. But that is PRECISELY what the "input prices equal output prices" postulate implies! Yet once we recognize that output prices can fall below input prices, there is a clear and immanent antagonism in the system. Greater productivity, falling values (prices). The clearest expression of this development today is in the telecommunications industry. It is the fundamental reason why AT&T, Lucent, etc., stock prices are going down the tubes. The bourgeois press "explains" this as a result of technological advance leading to excess supply. The real point, however, is that returns are lower because prices are falling, and the prices are falling because costs of production, i.e., values, are falling. It is all straight out of _Capital_. The physicalist (mainstream Marxian and Sraffian) economists, however, are completely unable to explain it. Ciao, Andrew Kliman