*"Supply and demand regulate nothing but the temporary fluctuations of market prices. They will explain to you why the market price of a commodity rises above or sinks below its value, but they can never account for the value itself."* http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch01.htm#c4
I also think we agree on much: Capital is not a bible (not sure anyone implied this), it has shortcomings due to the period in which it was written, that understanding neoclassicals and Keynes is critical, as is supply/demand, modern economic models, econometrics, etc. However, we obviously disagree on the labor theory of value (the value of a commodity is determined by the labor contained therein), which underpins all of Capital.
If there exist fully elaborated explanations of your interpretations, I'd be interested to see.
-PF
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 9:42 PM, Mike Beggs <mikejbeggs at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 3:41 AM, Peter Fay <peterrfay at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > 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
>
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-- Peter Fay