A footnote on value theory, but let's not get into this.

[Michael Perelman]

I don't know about what Marx thought on some deep level, but his writings never
suggested a material basis for value.  Instead, he insisted that value was the
social relation.  The transformation problem has occupied some academic
economists who wanted to make Marx's economics more academically "respectable".

Brad DeLong wrote:


> I seem to have fallen into an Orwellian neverland: I had not known
> that there was anyone who denied that at some deep level Marx thought
> of value as a substance--something created by socially-necessary
> labor power, and thereafter preserved as commodities moved through
> the sphere of circulation (let's not get into the destruction of
> capital in crises).
>
> Why else the extraordinary efforts to solve the "transformation
> problem"? Why else the insistence that the total amount of profits
> had to be equal to the total surplus values? Why the systematic
> denigration of the social value of all "unproductive labor"?
>
> To call a basic point in history of thought a "cheap sneer" surprises me...
>
> Brad DeLong

--

Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901