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>Hi Fred,
>
>No argument at all with your comment on my profferred piece from WL&C. I
>was simply trying to put forward a statement in which it was quite clear
>that, contra Rakesh's statements, Marx used "cost of production" in
>different ways, some times in the "prices of production" sense, other times
>in the "costs not including profits" sense.
Steve, I not talking about cost of production but COST PRICE, which in
TSVII Marx used as a synonym for PRICE OF PRODUCTION. He later only used
the latter for k + the average rate of profit while redefining cost price
as k.
Again this could not be clearer than it is in the first chapter of Vol 3.
I also don't see why Ajit would have been thinking about the TSV defintion
of cost price in the context of our discussion of the transformation
problem in Capital 3. Here the terms are clearly defined. Cost price is the
basis on which profit is appropriated.
And as Fred says Marx remained conceptually rigorous in differentiating
what a commodity costs a capitalist and what the cost or value or price of
production of commodity is. As I showed the distinction is clear already in
the Grundrisse. Marx seems not to have had a specific term for the former
until Capital in which he no longer used cost price and price of production
as synonyms but rather defined the former as the costs to the capitalist
and the latter as the cost of supply, in classical terms; i.e, the social
cost a capitalist imposes to supply a commodity.
Yours, Rakesh
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