Fred, I look forward to your reply, as I have learned much from your criticism of what we are calling the standard interpretation. As you doubtless know, David Laibman subjects your interpretation to criticism in the latest Science and Society; in both content and style his criticism reminds me of Ajit's! Even though we have our differences about the formula for value determination- -and the chief advantage of my interpretation at this point is that it makes sense of why Marx notes two reasons why the values of commodities diverge from their prices of production--I would also like to explore the importance we are both giving to price as the necessary form of appearance of value. Patrick Murray of course gives a Hegelian interpretation here in terms of the essence/appearance logic. Just to play around with the analogy to quantum mechanics again (as I read through David Z Albert's Quantum Mechanics and Experience). Monetary measurement forces a collapse of commodities into one of two eigenstates: value or no value. That is, a commodity undergoes a change from one state to another in the process of measurement. We can say that inventories can be represented by a superposition of these eigenstates! Of course there are at least two places where the analogy breaks down. (1) In QM, measurement supplies a *determinate value* for the observable while as Paul Mattick Jr has pointed out privately to me, we are not supplied alas with such a determinate value by money measurement. We cannot go from the price at which a commodity sells to its value. (2) In QM, we have *definite probabilities* for the values measurement will return. All the best, Rakesh
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