Brad, I am not an expert in value theory--ask jim Devine or someone who has devoted decades to thinbking about it--but I have never read a Marxists who thought that value was a substance. It's ABC of Marxist economics that it is a relation. I am astounded that you didn't know this. The proposition is not really debateable; it's like arguing that Descartes is a dualist.
> > Why else the extraordinary efforts to solve the "transformation
> > problem"?
Because (on my reading anyway) he wants an explanation of prices, but he has an argument taht values diverge from prices. Do you think that prices are a substance too?
>Why else the insistence that the total amount of profits
> > had to be equal to the total surplus values?
Because he wants to say that all profit is due to exploitation.
Why the systematic
> > denigration of the social value of all "unproductive labor"?
There's no such thing in Marx.
> >
> > To call a basic point in history of thought a "cheap sneer" surprises
>me...
Well, it's not a cheap sneer, then, but it is a fundamental confusion. Really, Brad, I am surprised. This is very elementary stuff. I'm not a fan if value theory,a s I say, but you're not in a s position to criticise it until you begin to see what everyone who is talking about it, from Marx on down, agrees on.
jks
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