A short comment about the maintainence of the so called two equalities after the transforming of the inputs, the modifying of cost prices. I argue that 1. after this modification total value should remain the same: 875 in the Bortkiewicz-Sweezy-Cottrell scheme 2. From this capitalists will subtract the money costs of what the output has cost them. 3. This money cost will change as a result of transforming the inputs (which again in a sequential process cannot be transformed into the same unit prices of production as the outputs, the devasting logical lapse which has created the whole transformation debate). 4. Less or more value will thus be left as surplus value to distributed over the branches in terms of r But this does not undermine the equality of total surplus value with the sum of the branch profits. It's the macro meaning of this equality which has to be understood. It's not a relation of equaity but determination. Marx's argument is that total surplus value sets the limit to what the sum of branch profits can be (see Mattick, 1983) If after the modifying of the inputs, less or more surplus value is left, this this mass, whatever it is, still sets the limit to the sum of branch profits. In my exchange with Allin, after the modification of the cost prices due to the inputs selling above their value, total surplus value is lessened from what it had been in the unmodified scheme (182, instead of 200), but this 182 still determines what the branch profits add up to in the modified scheme. So the second equality is preserved. I understand this to be the macro element of Fred's interpretation with which I am in total agreement. The keeping of the second equality does not mean that surplus value is the same in the unmodified and modified scheme (I challenge anyone to present a single quote where Marx articulates such an invariance condition); it means that total surplus value determines the upward limit to sum of the branch profits. In that sense they have to be equal. This so called second equality was turned into an invariance condition in a set of simultaneous equations which itself is foreign to Marx's dynamic approach. But it is no such thing. Marx never says that one will have the same magnitude of surplus value in the unmodified scheme as in the modified scheme. He says that this MACRO magnitude is prior to, and determinative, of the sum of branch profits. This is only to underline that exploitation is first and foremost a collective process by the capitalist class of the working class. It is a theoretical clarification of the highest order to which bourgeois economics, led by the so callled radicals in the profession, has responded with obfuscation and misinterpretation. This of course is nothing to be wondered at. all the best, r
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