re 5675 > >3. whether or not the prices that value-form theory is trying to explain >are disequilibrium actual market prices (as opposed to Marx's equilibrium >values and prices of production)? Fred, I don't think Marx believed in such a thing as equilibrium values. After all, to argue that the average rate of profit not only does not negate the law of value but becomes the form in which said law asserts itself does not commit one to the thesis that market is ever in the process of settling down on equilibrium values. You will note here that your equilibrium interpretatation of the law of value is at odds with Mattick Sr' interpretation of Marx (as well as Korsch's, Grossmann's and Blake's). While the political economists understood exchange to be regulated in long run equilibrium by equal labor time for equal labor time, Marx critiqued Ricardo for not grasping why implicit in the system of value--that is in the necessity that individual labor be represented through the exchange of things as general abstract social labor way--was not the tendency to equilibrium in exchange but crisis in accumulation. Of course Marx's value theoretic analysis of the possibility and necessity of crisis followed upon his materialist insight that the overthrow of capitalism could never follow from either the success of moral or ethical argument, no matter how analytically sound, or the fact that all previous modes of production had met their historic ends. Yours, Rakesh
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