> I see in the referenced notes from last year lots of speculation on what
> Marx was probably thinking, lots of "more or less", "implicitly", "in
> effect", "edges toward", etc. There is a long and well-tread path of those
> trying to insert words and ideas into Marx's writings that are simply not
> there in order to further their own ends. In no way do I see Marx anywhere
> saying/implying/thinking about/almost saying that price plays any role
> whatsoever in determining value. This contradicts everything he ever wrote,
> including Capital and Theories of Surplus Value. In fact he says exactly the
> opposite, many times.
I think you are wrong, but to be honest it doesn't matter much whether Marx said it or not, or fully realised that it was implicit in his argument (because 'social necessity' depends on price relative to income, as explicitly discussed in Vol. 3, and value depends on 'social necessity' because of economies of scale). We should be interested in the viability of the argument rather than what Marx wrote.
The reason I went to the effort of showing where these issues come up in Capital, and attempting to put it in its context in the history of economic thought, is not that I think Capital is a fully developed system of thought about capitalism, entirely adequate to our needs today. I don't - I think it's a brilliant classic of the 1860s, whose form and content was greatly influenced by the concerns of the classical political economy of 150 years ago. I make these points because a lot of people turn to Capital today for very good reasons - they want to understand how capitalism works in order to see how it might be transcended. But the conceptual gap between its frame of reference and the frames of reference we are brought up into today is large - both because capitalism has changed, and new phenomena are important to our situation (see Eubulides' list), and because economics the social science has evolved in the last 150 years, and not all for the bad. Keynesian and even neoclassical economics have developed concepts that are really useful and need to be engaged with. (For example, as I discussed in the old thread, Marx's strictures against supply-and-demand, so often quoted, have no force against neoclassical theories of price, because of their conception of both supply and demand as _schedules_, hardly conceived of in mid-19th century political economy.)
So people read Capital these days - or more regularly, just Volume 1 or just the first few chapters. Some forget it or reject it because the arguments are not convincing or don't seem to have any purchase on their concerns. Some become dogmatists, claiming that it is a full-scale alternative to deluded modern neoclassical economics, without really knowing how to engage with modern economics, because they are not clear on how the Marxian concepts relate to neoclassical/Keynesian ones, or to modern statistics. They tend to fall into a vortex of debating among themselves the finer points of the labour theory of value, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, etc, with basically philological arguments - the Bible decides.
Others are excited by all the burning insights in there about capitalism, even while they are troubled by inconsistencies and crucial points of the argument not quite convincing. It seems hard to pick and choose bits and pieces from Capital because of the way it all seems to fit together - if you take out one piece might it all fall down? Often they get drawn into the above vortex, looking for the interpretation that might make it all make sense. It's these people that I aim to convince, and of course I used to be one of them. And my point is that Marx was making an argument in a particular scientific context, even though he set himself against the political economy of the day - and there is no alternative to doing the same thing today, thinking for ourselves. That means becoming familiar with Keynes and the neoclassicals, and understanding how the structure of their visions differs from the classicals Marx engaged with. At first, the visions seem simply incommensurable, but gradually the parallax view starts to resolve itself and you start to see where the substantive arguments are.
> The one thing I've always liked about Marx is that he says exactly what he
> means and he means exactly what he says, and does not leave things implied,
> or almost-meant. (By the way, I've found the quotes from Penguin Publishers
> translation of Capital seems quite imprecise and at times inaccurate - try
> using the International Publishers translation - much cleaner.)
Oh, maybe that's where I went wrong, using the Penguin all these years.
Mike Beggs