re Fred's 4587 >Hi Rakesh, > >Thanks for your last two posts. There are several points I would like to >respond to, but this post will focus again on the key paragraph on >pp. 264-65 of Volume 3 that you continue to emphasize as "unequivocal" >textual evidence to support your interpretation. Dear Fred, This however is not my only evidence! I understand that we have two interpretations of these pages, so I tried to support my interpretation on other grounds. And indeed nowhere do you deny that Marx has postulated the experimental set up for his 3 volume gedankenexperiment (these can be cheap because they don't always require equipment, but they require a lot of imagination and therefore their explanatory power is perilously dependent on the imagination on the theorist's imagination!) Marx has set up the requirement that all commodities exchange at [prices determined by (or proportional to)] their full value in a self enclosed capitalist system in which the value of money is constant, there is no foreign trade, credit is excluded, only two classes confront one another. Marx carries the requirement of exchange of all commodities at full value over to volume 3; it is then relaxed in a rigorous logical demonstration for the outputs (only commodities produced by capitals of average organic compositions are shown to exchange at prices determined by or proportional to values); once the category price of production is derived, it is then noted that determination of cost price would have to be modified since it has been *required* that the inputs be purchased not in terms of prices of production but rather at prices determined by or proportional to their full values. I provided you two quotes from vol 1 where Marx laid out this rule of his game or thought experiment. This does not mean that cost price is no longer a given presupposition in the production of a commodity. It means that the determinate cost price which is a given presupposition in his transformation tableaux has been determined in terms of the stipulation that all commodities (labor power included) exchange at their full value. Marx notes then that just as the outputs (tendentially) exchange in terms of prices of production rather than values, the cost price of a commodity cannot be equated--as he had hitherto *required* in his gedanken experiment--with the value of the consumed commodities. So I am not just relying on this passage but the logic of Marx's gedanken experiment. I'll leave it here for now. Yours, Rakesh
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