>Nicky, also I think you misinterpret Murray on this point. Fred, I enjoy our discussions immensely, but I think it would be pointless for us to get into a long sub-debate on which of us has the 'correct' interpretation of Murray's paper. What I am doing in my work is picking up on a *distinction* first made by Murray between essence and appearance in the Ricardian and Hegelian forms of logic, and *applying* that distinction to an analysis of my own. I don't want to make any judgements about the extent to which Murray would agree (or disagree!) with my application. What is important in Murray, for my argument, is his insight that: 'Under this dialectical [Hegelian] conception of essence and appearance, science is no longer a one-way steet that externally relates appearances to essence [Ricardian model]; it works both from the appearances to the essence and from the essence to the appearances. Appearances are no longer viewed as extraneous to the essence ...[but] *belong* to the complete concept of the essence; they are interdependent' (p.40). The points I have repeatedly (and apparently unsuccessfully) tried to make in this respect are: (1) there can be no sense in which essence is independent or autonomous of appearance, as would be the case if these moments were viewed as independent and dependent variables in a causal theory, and (2) determination is not from labour-values to prices - NEITHER IS IT FROM PRICES TO VALUES (a position you repeatedly, and wrongly, attribute to VFT); rather, form-determination pertains to *what* necessitates the interconnection of values and prices. Note here the particular meaning of the term *value-form* in VFT theory: value-form is an abstract universal concept pertaining to the *mode of association* necessitated by the particular (determinate) social form that productive activity takes on in capitalism - i.e. dissociated labour, dissociated production and consumption, private ownership of means of production etc. By transcending the contradiction set up by dissociated activity, the value-form (mode of association) provides the first movement towards a grounding of value in price. The existence of the market (a more concrete determination of the value-form as mode of association) does *not* therefore transcend the contradiction posed by dissociation, but shows value that it cannot exist for itself (independently of price). You request a summary interpretation of Marx's passage. Difficult since, imho, no passage or chapter in Marx can be interpreted in isolation from it's place in the whole of Capital, or in isolation from the debate on Marx's method. However... >"Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however >incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. >But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that >particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why >the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of >the value of the product." ...From a VFT perspective, the fundamental question posed by Marx is why content (eg use-value/concrete-labour) is 'concealed within' or has 'assumed' particular forms (eg value/abstract-labour).. Given the concept of form determination, as I have described it above, this question is not concerned with a splitting of value and price into essence/content and appearance/form as autonomous entities between which causal relations can then be established. It has to do with the question of what the essence of capitalism *must* be, in order that labour and its measurement *must* take on the form of value and its measurement. i.e. the problem for theory is to establish how the social form of production for exchange *determines* the necessary (internal) interconnection of labour and value and of labour time and price. As I see it, our differences on all other questions stem from these differences of interpretation and method. comradely Nicky ---------------------------------- Nicola Mostyn (Taylor) Faculty of Economics Murdoch University Australia Telephone: 61-8-9385 1130
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