>
> Then what is the relation between value and price? I thought that all the
> available evidence
> suggests that the connection is in fact robust. It seems to me that you are
> retreating to a world
> of scholastic distinctions though the theory is meant to give us a purchase
> on the real world dynamics of capitalism.
>
If you don't want to read Marx or listen to Harvey in order to understand Marx then just say so. You asked a very specific set of questions, I gave you very specific answers, you said you didn't understand (and hinted that you didn't accept) them, I suggested a place to start if you wanted to understand my answers and you ignored my first point about rents (and showed no interest in their complexity) and then said that I was retreating into scholasticism when you know nothing about my work... only that I answer conceptual questions with conceptual answers. If you want to play nice, I'll play nice, if you don't I don't need to continue this.
>
> > Understanding the
> > abstraction usually necessitates reading Marx.
> >
>
> I think what you are really saying is that only people who can understand
> abstraction
> can read Marx and that I am too dumb for you to actually waste your time
> on!
> I can't listen to 40 hours of lectures on Marx right now.
>
I never said anything about your intelligence, I said that understanding the way Marx abstracts Value is very challenging and is beyond what I can do in an email exchange (I have a life off the list just like you) and that reading Marx is the best way to go. It took me ten weeks of intensive study to get through Volume One in a seminar in grad school, years of working with and through this stuff in my own applied work, fourteen weeks of teaching it myself and then extensive discussions of the dialectic before giving a paper at the Left Forum last year to get where I am on this stuff... if I can't summarize that process in quick emails, that's not something I feel guilty about. I'm sure you already know that there is nothing simple about any of this.
>
> > Your approach conflates individual exchanges of money for commodities
> with
> > the structural dynamics of capitalism,
>
> How are the structural dynamics connected to those individual exchanges?
>
> This sort of question, too, is a huge and has been debated for 150 years,
Michael Perelman's work is probably an excellent place to start. Perhaps
others will have better suggestions.