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> 'Value' after all, is not something that Marx thought up. It is not as though it was something that he could have named arbitrarily, calling it Kryptonite, or 'factor X', for example. Everyone knows that there is real value behind the accidental price that the market sets - which is why you always get a few estimates, or make some price comparisons, before you buy or sell.
James, I think I'm mostly on the same page and maybe my objection is pedantic. I agree about the distinction between 'real' value and accidental price, which reflects unsustainable short-run fluctuations. I guess my reservation was with the idea that Vol 1 value as embodied socially-necessary labour-time was this underlying 'real' value.
The reason I called it an epistemological device rather than something real was that I think the justification for starting with the assumption that commodities exchange at the ratio of the labour time necessary to produce them, ignoring differences in capital intensity, is that Marx needs to build the concept of capital out of value before he can show how capital reflects back on relative price determination. But in reality competition never actually abstracts in this way: competition doesn't first sort out the socially necessary labour time then adjust for capital intensity - capitals chasing profit differentials don't care. So I think when you use value in the sense you're talking about, as a centre of gravity underlying observed prices, you're really talking about prices-of-production.
Mike Beggs