Gary, if you are listening, i am going to repeat something which I have said ad nauseum on this list, but I will present it as a critique of Garegnani on Ricardo and Marx. let's even accept the dogma that the inputs are in the form of values. what is surprising is that garegnani acutely lays out how ricardo's critique of adding up theories was developed by marx [there can be no doubt that Marx is not possible without Ricardo's success on this quantitative front; it is the qualitative aspect of the (mis-)representation of value by way of another commodity which Ricardo does not understand--thus his failure to grasp both money and the possibility of general crisis: of this garegnani says nothing, allowing Gary to claim that Marx was interested in the same problems as Ricardo], At any rate, having laid out the centrality of the adding up critique, Garegnani then assumes that in the transformation problem there should be two invariance conditions. but this makes no sense. If we are not changing the labor time objectified in the output (nor the value of money--and Garegnani does seem like Ricardo to hold it constant in his analysis), then it follows from the critique of adding up theories that any modification in cost price consequent on the the transformation of the inputs from simple prices to prices of production means that surplus value has to move in the inverse direction. There is no other way for cost price and surplus value to remain resolved, antagonistic components of the total value that per the critique of adding up theories is given and fixed before distribution. The mass of surplus value has to be modified in inverse direction to cost price once the value of money is fixed. And Garegnani does seem to assume that it is. Now Allin and Ajit may want to raise questions about this, but Garegnani, following Ricardo, allows the value of money to be constant in the transformation. Simply put, it follows from the critique of the adding up theories which is so profoundly understood by Garegnani that the mass of surplus value cannot be held invariant while the cost price for the production of a commodity output in which the same quantity of labor is objectified is being modified. Garegnani thus repeats the two dogmas of the transformation problem: that the inputs are in the form of values or simple prices and that if they are in this form there should be two invariance conditions in the complete transformation problem. It just speaks to how profound the pressure to bury Marx is that Garegnani can lay out Marx's development of the critique of the adding up theory and then immediately go on to stipulate that there should be two invariance conditions without even noting that the invariance of the mass of surplus value cannot be allowed once the critique of adding up theories is recognized. Rakesh
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