> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> > I haven't read it in a while, but my recollection
> is
>
> > that the notes that form the basis of vols 2 and 3
> > overlap in part with the unpublished (well, now
> > published, but never as a finished product) Theories
> of > Surplus Value
>
> Andie, you are confusing the 1861-1863 manuscripts,
> from which the Theories of Surplus Value are taken,
> with the 1863-1865 manuscripts from which the "Results
> of the Immediate Process of Production" (the so-called
> "unpublished sixth chapter" of Capital) and
> Engel's
> sources for Volume 3 are taken (but not Volume 2; for
> that, Engels used a number of later manuscripts).
>
> > the manuscripts are a total miss, illegible
> > palimpsests. It's amazing that Engels was able to
> put > together anything out of those notes.
>
> > (note to andie nachgeborenen, as you are also a critic
> of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: in the
> book by Heinrich I am translating, as well as in his
> more academic book _Die Wissenschaft vom Wert_, he
> formulates a mathematical critique of the so-called
> tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Heinrich's
> undergraduate education was in math and physics.)
An education in math and physics is not necessarily a recommendation: we have lots of mathematically sophisticated neoclassicals whose models have no relation to reality. I am not a skeptic about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as much as I am agnostic; it might, depending on how you measure it and over what period and what the facts show. I am sympathetic to Brenner's work which shows the RoP falling since the end of the Golden Years as a result is a deeper crisis of overproduction.
What I am a skeptic about is the utility of value theory, I can talk it from the inside; I think it has historical and exegetical interest, but very limited if any utility as a tool of economic analysis, especially if treated as a price theory of the sort I mentioned in a previous post on the transformation problem. I think it is a pretty good heuristic to explain why there is exploitation, but a ladder you can kick away once you have climbed it.
>
> On the side, I am also translating an essay by a
> bright fellow named Ingo Elbe that offers a
> historical-theoretical sketch of the "Neue
> Marx-Lektüre" that emerged in West Germany in the
> 1970s. Adorno students like Hans-Georg Backhaus and
> Helmut Reichelt kickstarted an attempt to reconstruct
> Marx's critique of political economy, free of both the
> dogmatic orthodoxy of Second/Third International
> Marxism, as well as of the historicist-humanist
> orientation of Western Marxism. This is the
> theoretical background of the contemporary
> "value-form" approach of figures like Postone and
> Chris Arthur.
>
Sounds interesting. Wish I had the time for that.