[lbo-talk] Marxology question

[andie nachgeborenen]

Short version: price is proportional to value over the long term. Meaning: it's not that there's a function that converts prices into values mechanically, but over the long term prices fluctuate around value. In modern statistical terms, value explains (in the statistical sense) some significant variance in and level of pricing. That's a standard way of stating it that also show why there is a transformation problem. Personally I think value theory is hooey, but the problem you raise is not an real issue for the theory.

--- On Sun, 8/10/08, negative potential <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> wrote:


> From: negative potential <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Marxology question
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Sunday, August 10, 2008, 9:51 AM
> 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")
> 
> 
> 
> 
>       
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