Hey everybody, I've been spending time with the _Grundrisse_ and the _Urtext_ recently in order to write my response to Charles, so I haven't been posting on the ongoing value-theory thread yet, but I wanted to chime in with a quick "me too" post:
Carrol wrote:
> but the perspective advanced here denies that there is a
> transformation problem because Marx's value theory, unlike Ricardo's
> value theory, isNOT INTENDED TO EXPLAIN PRICES!
And Doug wrote:
> I've long thought the whole value theory/transformation problem
> debate was a total goddamn waste of time.
Carrol and Doug and John Gulick are all 100% correct.
>From the perspective of value-form theory, THERE IS NO TRANSFORMATION PROBLEM, because value exists at an entirely different level of abstraction in Marx's presentation than the category of price. As John
Gulick points out, "value" is not an empirically existing physical magnitude; it's the form assumed by social labour in a capitalist society (more on this in my response to Charles).
The transformation of "value" into "production prices" is literally meaningless.
To try to reduce it to a short sentence: value is not a quantity underlying price; value is a social relationship expressed through price.
And I'd second Carrol's recommendation of I.I. Rubin. Unfortunately, Freddy Perlman's excellent introduction to Perlman's book is not available online, but Rubin's book itself is: http://www.marxists.org/archive/rubin/value/index.htm