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Gil, doesn't Marx's statement
"the formation of capital must be possible even though the price and
value of a commodity be the same, for it cannot be explained by referring
to any divergence between price and value"
precisely close for him your "question of whether price-value disparities
might be a *necessary* condition for the existence of surplus value".
In other words, he wants to establish the formation of capital WITHOUT
price/value divergence; he refuses to permit price/value divergence to
establish the formation of value. If so, I don't understand that you have
proven the "invalidity of this part of Marx's argument"; you rather seem
to have changed the question.
Please keep in my mind my limited knowledge of these (for me, endless)
disputes about the first part of Capital.
Paul Z.
***********************************************************************
Paul Zarembka, supporting RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY
******************** http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka
Gil Skillman <gskillman@mail.wesleyan.edu> said, on 05/27/00:
>Assume for a moment that in his Chapter 5 argument Marx *does not* take
>as given that capitalist exploitation is based on capitalist production;
>in line with Fred's interpretation, I'll consider the implications of
>reversing this assumption below. Now:
>1) Marx concludes Chapter 5 with the claim that surplus value has to be
>explained "in such a way that the starting point is the exchange of
>equivalents," that is, the condition that all commodities exchange at
>their respective values. He then uses this conclusion explicitly at the
>beginning of Chapter 6 to justify the inference that in order to
>appropriate surplus value capitalists *must* (Marx's term) purchase labor
>power *as a commodity* and extract its use value, labor, to the extent of
>yielding surplus labor. Thus, if Marx's conclusion at the end of Ch. 5
>is invalid, his inference at the beginning of Ch. 6 is invalidly derived.
>2) Marx advances a direct and an indirect argument for the conclusion
>that surplus value has to be explained on the basis of price-value
>equivalence. The direct argument is that this conclusion follows from the
>fact that price-value disparities *taken alone* cannot account for the
>existence of surplus value:
>"The reader will see from the foregoing discussion that the meaning of
>this statement [the chapter 5 conclusion mentioned above] is only as
>follows: the formation of capital must be possible even though the price
>and value of a commodity be the same, for it cannot be explained by
>referring to any divergence between price and value." (p 269)
>A)First, the statement that price-value disparities in exchange cannot
>*of themselves* account for the existence of surplus value follows
>immediately from the definition of surplus value as "valorization" of
>value, i.e. the creation of new value rather than mere redistribution of
>existing value. Creation of new value presupposes production, and
>exchange is obviously not production. So you don't really need an entire
>chapter to make this point.
>B) Second and more critically, all this point establishes logically is
>that price-value disparities do not constitute a *sufficient* condition
>for the existence of surplus value. *This leaves entirely open the
>question of whether price-value disparities might be a *necessary*
>condition for the existence of surplus value. Without addressing this
>additional question, it is *logically impossible* to reach Marx's
>categorical conclusion at the end of Ch. 5. So even if I go no further,
>I've established the invalidity of this part of Marx's argument.
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