Allin, You presented the B-S tableau and then carried out the iteration implicit in their set of transformation equations. I also proposed a method of iteration based on another set of equations which were neither over nor underdetermined. I argued that in this iteration both equalities would be maintained. You then replied that while the first equality was given by stipulation in my iteration, the second equality would not be maintained upon completion of the iteration. You said that surplus value, defined as total value minus the value of the inputs, would not be equal to the sum of profits in the final modified scheme. I then showed that your definition of surplus value could not be Marx's for it leads to an adding up theory of price. You have not denied that your definition does lead to an adding up theory of price! In fact you simply ignored the latter half of a recent message in which I showed again that this does follow from your definition of surplus value. Though you propose no definition of surplus value, you still insist that the mass of surplus value does not equal the sum of profits as the transformation procedure is extended to the inputs. I have shown that the definition of surplus value as total price minus cost price is textually supported (even in the passages which you cite), and is implied by Marx's acceptance of Ricardo's critique of Smith's adding up theory of price. You have not denied this either. By this definition of surplus value, the second equality is maintained in the final modified equilibrium scheme of the iteration which I propose. Moreover, the second equality is given in the fourth of my equations (the sum of surplus value, properly defined as total price minus cost price, is given on the left side and the sum of branch profits is given on the right side); since (as it turns out) this set of equations is neither over nor underdetermined, this transformation procedure can be solved while maintaining the second equality. If you are going to continue to argue that I do not maintain the second equality, you have to provide an argument and textual support for the definition of surplus value implicit in your charge that in my final tableau the theorem that the mass of surplus value determines the sum of profits is not preserved. If you do not define the terms in the two theorems or equalities which must be preserved in the complete transformation, how can we possibly make progress in the debate? You have not even given evidence for the 100 year old dogma that Marx thought the sums of surplus values for the respective departments or branches would remain unchanged once the inputs were transformed as well, which of course is something Marx did not do. I have given you clear evidence (p. 309) where Marx recognized that the relation between necessary and surplus labor or the rate of surplus value (and thus the sums of surplus values) would indeed be modified once wage goods were allowed to be sold above or below value. Why is this not evidence that the sum of surplus values is also an unknown, not an invariance condition, in the complete transformation? You of course have not denied that profit remains entirely derived from unpaid labor throughout the iteration which I propose. You have not denied that Marx's transformation algorithm (the nine steps which I specified) provides a determinate method of iteration by which a non obvious vector of equilibrium prices can indeed be generated while at the same time there remains positive profit, derived entirely from unpaid labor, since at no point in the iteration will total price be entirely resolved into cost price as it modified by the transformation of the inputs. To someone as naive as me, this all seems to indicate that Marx's value theoretic transformation procedure is indeed logically sound even as it extended to the inputs. To me it seems that high faluting algebra has become the weapon by which bourgeois economists have attempted to slay Marx or at least discourage students from taking up its research programme with bombastic claims that Marxian value theory is fatally logically flawed and unscientific. It is nothing to be wondered at that the accusations are made not by openly bourgeois academics but economists dressed in leftist clothing. Why would it be otherwise? When has it been otherwise? Happy thanksgiving, Rakesh
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