Just to emend what I wrote: > This is not the traditional transformation problem; as fred has put >it, I have been raising the problem of an inverse transformation >problem. Jerry, just to beat the dead horse. Samuelson of course discusses the Morishima-Seton inverse transformation problem--that is taking as given columns 1 (cost price) and columns 5 (price of production) and then by calculating a uniform s/v deriving the entries for columns 2 (surplus value) and 3 (total value). Samuelson has great fun mocking this since it putatively now shows that profit holds surplus value. He uses a lot of exclamation points as if he has really scored big time. But he seems not to understand Marx one bit. Marx would neither have thought it possible nor would have he been the least interested in getting exactly right the value entries for the individual capitals. Value theory never allows one to determine the value transferred or surplus value produced any one capital. That is, Marx would never have tried to carry out an actual inverse transformation (it's impossible to do an inverse transformation in each individual case because as I have been arguing the actual value transferred cannot be directly observed or measured). For Samuelson to think otherwise just reveals profound ignorance of the nature of Marxian theory, and I maintain that Samuelson has himself read very little of Marx--he relies on Meek, Sweezy and Dobb. For Marx, value theory was meant to explain not the micro magnitudes of exchange ratios in which the vulgar economist is interested above all else but the movements in the average rate of profit as a result of changes (mainly) in the OCC, that is, the alternation between prosperity and depression. That is, Marx is attempting to explain the movement in the average rate of profit in terms of not directly observable and measurable changes in the value magnitudes--vcc, s/v, etc. I think Mattick Sr's chapter on the labor theory of value in marx and keynes is outstanding on the real explanandum of Marxian value theory. Rakesh
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