>At 5:40 +0100 10-11-2000, Fred B. Moseley wrote: >>Hi Riccardo, >> >>Thanks very much for your clarifications. I hope you don't mind if I ask >>for further clarifications below. The main thrust of my questions is that >>I would like to see your equations that express the various aspects of >>your interpretation of Volume 1. Without the equations, it is hard for me >>to figure out what you are saying. > >Sorry, Fred. I've no special equations. I agree with Foley's ones (see his >last paper in the RRPE), including the comments on you and on Brinkman >(acting as a bridge between the 'dual' interpretation and the monetary one). Riccardo (and Duncan), don't have the latest RRPE paper. but I don't see how Duncan's equations are correct in his *Understanding Capital*. In applying the transformation procedure to the steel inputs, he has its *price* rise from $2.00 to $2.208 so the total price of the input steel goes from $15,000 to $16,560. But once the steel input is transformed into the form of the price of production, Duncan then says: "The VALUE OF CONSTANT CAPITAL has not remained unchanged and as a result the total price of the commodities has changed..." (p.101; my emphasis) Total price goes to $36,560 from $35,000. But of course a change in the price of the inputs in this "transformation case" is exactly not a result of a change in the value of those inputs and thus a change in the value of the means of production consumed in the output and thus in total value or price (the monetary expression of value). It is simply impossible in Marxian terms for a change in cost alone to issue in rising prices. Implicit in Duncan's argument is what Marx called an irrational formula: k + s => C ($35,000) (k + a) + s => C + a ($36,560) But cost price is not *itself* formative of value. Marx is explicit here, so a change in cost price alone, i.e., without any change in the value of the means of production, cannot itself change total output value or price. The new interpretation simply has it wrong: it is the mass of surplus value which has to give if costs are raised by a simple upward change in the price of the inputs whose value remains unchanged throughout the transformation. C => k + s So if cost price is modified C => (k+a) + (s-a). No matter what Bortkiewicz or Sweezy or Meek said, it is not possible in Marxian terms for the mass of surplus value to remain invariant if one modifies the cost price of total commodity output whose total value and price remain unchanged. It is no defense of Marx to hold the mass of surplus value (or value added) invariant in the transformation. Yours, Rakesh
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