SA wrote:
> Then I wonder how you square this interpretation
with
> the notion that there exists a meaningful "law of
> value"? If you can't convert value into price, how
> would you state the law of value, in layman's terms?
Huh? Who said anything about "can't"?
It isn't a question of "can" versus "can't"; it's a matter of being superfluous. The conversion of value into price is a tautology, since the analysis of "value" in chapter one of Vol. I is an abstraction from all the determinate categories that are introduced later in the analysis. "Value" does not have an ontological status independent of "price".
Another brilliant exponent of the "neue Marx-lektüre", Dieter Wolf, summarizes this nicely:
"The presentation in Capital starts with the sphere of circulation of commodities and money regarded under the aspect of a precondition of capitalist production by abstracting away (disregarding) that this sphere is at the same time the result of the capitalist production. Marx recognized this procedure during his work on the Grundrisse based on the knowledge that this is the only way to capture social labour in its historically specific social forms. As precondition and result commodity circulation is produced and reproduced. It must be explained by analysing what happens specifically within its contemporary history and not what happened in a certain way in its historical past. Therefore the scientific mode of presentation realized in Capital is characterized as logic-systematic and not as historical. The logic-systematic character of the dialectical method is demonstrated by examining the relations between the first three chapters of the Capital, especially by examining the particular role which the second chapter plays in comparison to the first. Emphasizing the force of abstraction, Marx crystallized by means of abstractions the first three chapters of Capital as three steps of the logically systematic presentation in order to explain money and with it the circulation of commodities. To think change and interaction in an adequate way requires the process of abstraction. To explain money and commodities bearing a price Marx disregards price and money to find invisibly included in them less concrete forms, i. e. simpler forms consisting of commodities being units of use value and value."
Full text: http://www.dieterwolf.net/seiten/veroeff.html (scroll down to "Critical Theory and Critique of Political Economy")