A philological point relating to my previous post. I complain that in the FN against CPE Marx seems to start with a different point than that in the text without notice. Part of the explanation is that in the first edition of C the FN occurs in what might be thought its natural place, at the very end of what would become section 3. Then for the second edition he seems to have thought: why not collate together the crits of CPE? and just transferred the FN without thinking over the consequences, namely as Fred naturally did taking the FN as expansion of the text. However there is a deeper issue here worthy of notice. As Rubin stresses marx realised the necessity to distinquish value and exchange value very late indeed. It was his last conceptual breakthrough (the penultimate one was the reproduction schemas - hence the unfinished state they are in). As late as the first edition of C there is a footnote saying value is just an abbreviation for exchange value. Of course in essence he had done so but continued to use the old terminology. Bailey's tellng polemic was that EV is clearly a relation so why are the Ricardians treating it as a substance? In response Marx was forced to make the V/EV distinction. This is of course of enormous importance. Someone like Robinson sees no harm in trying to correlate labour times and prices but throws up her hands in horror when the invisible mediator value appears. The reason Marx's lateness is relevant is that he does not get around to clearly sorting out a terminology to carefully distinguish the sense in which value is a form of something else and the sense in which it has forms of its own. In both German and English these tend to be called 'value form' indifferently, with horrible consequences for unwary readers. Geert made the point ages ago that we need a terminology to distinguish these two different value forms viz that in which value is the form of th product and that in which value takes forms of its own e.g. money. Moreover , as I streesed, the two cases are not in the least analogous. For those into Hegel the value v.forms of value one has to do with essence and appearance in the Logic. The V/UV one has to do with the relation of the Logic to the non-logical, which is only metaphorically one of appearance and essence. Chris 17 Bristol Road, Brighton, BN2 1AP, England
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