Fred and Alejandro, So I agree with you that Marx's first transformation table cannot be in the form of C-C', as for example argued by Meghnad Desai who follows Bortkiewicz, Sweezy, Meek, Steedman and others. Rather the first table is M-C' and the second M-M'--we do not have a commodity value and a price of production table. Yet if the inputs are already in the price of production form, what is the error to which Marx himself calls attention? As we all know, the transformation problem is said to have Marx's own imprimatur due to the confession of error he putatively made. Now this is where I find you both unconvicing. You both would have it that the error is inconsequential for Marx's price of production and price/value divergence calculations. Then there wouldn't be any real error of significance. So why then would Marx be worried about going wrong? In construcing the tableaux Marx had forgotten his fundamental principle, best understood by Mattick Jr, that value relations cannot treated as if they are observable and directly measurable. Having forgotten this, Marx then wrote up his tables as if that the value transferred from the machine to the final product is exactly matched or divulged by the visible flow price of the machine. Value, like Boltzmann's atomic hypothesis, after all is a category of understanding, not a category of depiction. This of course no more makes value a useful fiction or Sombartian gedankensbild than atoms. It's no less reasonable to attribute reality to value though we cannot observe and directly measure it than it is for a child to learn that a teddy bear which is shown and then put behind a screen is still there but out of sight. The urge to attribute reality to objects we cannot see is something we all learn at an early age, and which is essential to our being able to navigate in the real world. But the Machian stricture against unobservable has been applied by several critics against Marx's value theory on the grounds that it represents unfounded theoretical speculation. So, Fred and Alejandro, in confusing value as at once an unobservable and visible category, you are holding up the philosophical debate we should be having about the 'metaphysical' status of Marx's theorizing. Yours, Rakesh
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