You are mistaking me for someone who is interested in this question.
--- bhandari at berkeley.edu wrote:
> Andie
>
> 1. In doing away with value apparatus, are you
> suggesting that science
> should prefer economy over realism?
>
> 2. I did agree that you could do away with the value
> apparatus if you
> lived in an economy in where there was no money and
> in which the same,
> never changing things served as inputs and magically
> re-appeared as the
> only, never changing outputs produced in the ever
> same way. Yes in that
> economy capital can be aggregated, the rate of
> profit and prices
> determined without recourse to value once the
> distributional question is
> resolved extra economically.
>
> Just don't see what that proves.
>
> For once the outputs are novel or technical change
> occurs
> inter-periodically the Sraffian theory as a theory
> of the real center of
> gravity simply falls apart (too many unknowns now
> given the equations)
> harder and more totally than does Marx's theory once
> you complete the
> transformation procedure (by the way I argue that
> more than one hundred
> years of criticism has basically inverted the way in
> which Marx's
> procedure was incomplete; it was not that he failed
> to transform the
> inputs from values or simple prices to prices of
> production as the means
> of production and wage goods are assumed from the
> outset to have been
> bought at market prices; rather he had mistakenly
> assumed that the value
> transferred from the means of production was
> proportional to their cost
> price but once price-value disparity is admitted,
> Marx had to concede that
> he had made a mistake in his estimation of the value
> transferred from the
> means of production to the respective values of the
> branch outputs--this
> is the correct reading of the famous passage in
> which there was an
> admission of error, circa pp 256-57 of Capital 3
> Penguin from memory).
>
> At any rate, you complain about epicycles but your
> rival theory must make
> too many fantastic assumptions to close the
> equations--no new products, no
> on going technical change, no money, a necessarily
> equalized rate of
> profit for all capitals (again to reduce the
> unknowns to the number of
> equations). In other words, society must be a solid
> crystal for the theory
> to have realism, not a metamorphosizing organism.
> Even Geoff Hodgson
> abandoned Sraffian theory for evolutionary
> economics.
>
>
> 3. To reject Marx's value theory you have to
> understand what it is. The
> analytical Marxists simply missed that it is a
> theory of money, not a
> theory of the simple identity between relative and
> equivalent form but a
> theory of a contradictory unity rooted in the
> contradiction immanent to
> the commodity. You seem as at home with the flat
> logical contradiction
> that the Sraffian theory is only an immanent
> critique of marginalism but
> also a description of real center of gravity on the
> basis of reified
> technical things as you are at sea with real
> contradictions many of which
> I have been mentioning here. This is the failing of
> the analytical
> Marxists, I think Sean Sayers has really begun the
> good fight here even if
> one does not want to reconsider the law of
> non-contradiction.
>
> 4. I have never suggested that the critique of the
> labor theory of value
> is idiotic. I teach against it. I emphasize that
> there is no sin against
> science in rejecting it. Mentioned several
> criticisms already. But I do
> think that many of the criticisms are bunk.
>
> Rakesh
>
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