The number of issues going on under this thread is rather immense. I will restrict to three issues: (1) simplicity of VFT; (2) ontological status of form; and (3) briefly, prediction. (1) SIMPLICITY OF VFT I am very glad that at least some contributors to this thread think of Value-form theory as simple. Any theoretician would hope that a theory is received that way, and in my contributions to theory that is at least something that I aim for. As a contributor to VFT, however, I have some problem here, since I still see it as rather complex -- for the time being unavoidably so as, for the time being, its object-reality is still complex to me. The difficulty is to grasp appropriately the inherent duality of the capitalist system, that is its physical-material make-up and its monetary-form make-up. (The complexity goes beyond value theory, that is merely the elementary part.) Surely (imo) these are not two parallel issues -- as `classical' essence--appearance and content--form views might see it -- but interconnected ones. Of course this is related to the central point of critique of VFT of any monistic theory, reducing the lot to merely one of its poles (be it 'physicalist' (abstract-)labour-embodied theories and Neoclassical utility theories -- only in this respect of course they are in the same camp; or, the other pole, some Keynesian and business economics strands). The point is that the social form (in the case of capitalism the VF) affects the "content" -- we cannot, without loosing sight of what is going on, think of the content in abstraction from the form. A way of capturing this is Marx's theory of `real' -- as opposed to `formal' -- subsumption, of the Results (on which Patrick Murray has written in the past and will also publish in the forthcoming issue of *Historical Materialism*). Of course, to the extent that -- at least some -- labour-embodied theories see LE-*value* as `content', they must run into trouble here, since value for them is also `form'. Thus the concepts collapse (are reduced to each other). Surely, here lies a *paradigmatic* problem of understanding each other. (2) ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF FORM With the first point I have prepared my comment of the second. Form -- the VF in our case -- *does* have ontological status because of its ontological affect on things and processes. This is of course the duality of commodities (and BTW also the reason why transformations to other MoP is complex). Of course labour is necessary to the CPM. However, the naturalistic "reduction" to "labour content", say hours -- even complex hours --, is seems to me, is to abstract from [cf Jerry 5518] the essential form determination of the CMP. Again, form determination is not an ephitomon, it has ontological reality. If this ontological status of the VF is not taken into account then our (Michael Williams and me) coining of money as `pure form' risk being misunderstood. (I guess Michael agrees, but I speak for myself here). The `pure' refers to the point that the shape (gold, cattle, accounting entries etc) does not essentially matter, thus is contingent (however -- Michael made this point already -- the one shape may, in some stage I would add, be more efficient than another). Of course this contingency reveils one aspect of the weirdness of the VF. (3) PREDICTION One final, other, point [re Jerry's intial; re Paul C's 5516; and Jerry's 5526], I dont think that VF-theorists have any `objection in principle' to prediction, at least I have not. I wished I could predict prices. However, here lies no priority in my research since I doubt that any theory can predict prices. But of course even if a "theory" (I suppose rather some algorithm or model) could predict well (for a time being) -- like Jerry I dont know of such a model -- that may not make it sufficiently explanatory. Within a phase of the business cycle naive models [in brief: y(t+1) = a(y(t-x))] usually provide good predictors, but that does not make them explanatory in a non-superficial sense. (And if, generally, you take out the cyclical component of the data, you may have a host of not too bad hindsight `predictors'.) [cf the huge literature around Friedmanian Instrumentalism.] Comradely, Geert ˙WPC
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