From: Jurriaan Bendien (andromeda246@HETNET.NL)
Date: Sun May 16 2004 - 04:05:30 EDT
Hi Rakesh, > Yes, I have a library copy. I still don't agree with how TSS attempts > to dissolve dualism (Bruce Roberts' Althusserian interpretations are > however very stimulating) and how TSS disarticulates the value from > (what they call) the material rate of profit. Which "dualism" do you have in mind ? The necessary deviation of prices from labor-values, which implies that labor-values can only be estimated retrospectively, is a kind of "dualism". But this dualism seems more like a contradiction, namely that assets and labor are used to produce output values in advance of knowing exactly what they are worth in the current market, to which continual adjustments must be made by producers. The other day I was skimming through Marx's mathematical manuscript in MEGA II (in preparation for Capital Vol. 3) which is devoted to the quantitative relationships between the rate and mass of surplus-value, and the rate and mass of profit. It's clear here that Marx was really exploring the parameters of competition as a dynamic process, i.e. Marx was advancing a value theory about the movements of rate and mass of profit in price terms. This is quite legitimate, and I still don't quite understand why there's been so much fuss about it, given that in calculating internal rates of return and suchlike, accountants and businesspeople themselves have to confront temporal discrepancies in valuation and theoretical price comparisons all the time, and freely talk about "values" and "theoretical prices" (prices which they think "would" apply "if" goods or services were sold). That is, there has to be some agreement about how to value assets and goods, which is based on accepting specific relations between the prices of specific quantities of specific assets and goods, at a specific currency exchange rate, as the basis for valuation. Marx himself explicitly acknowledged in Capital Vol. 3 that the accounting identity of total prices=total values, which he assumes in his models on the basis that he thinks the quantitative deviations between them cannot be so great, does not really apply in reality, given continual shifts in the relationships between socially necessary labour-time and market demand during any one accounting period. This being the case, it's remarkable how many economists nevertheless interpret the accounting identity used for modelling purposes as an ontological identity. I think a satisfactory solution of the transformation problem is more likely, if we inquire more into the ontology of prices, i.e. distinguish appropriately between actual market prices and theoretical (hypothetical, potential) prices. If we do so, it's clear that in any aggregation of prices or comparison of price aggregates, some value-theoretic principle must be assumed. In fact, notions of "price signals" or "economic depreciation" etc. imply value-relations. When post-Marxists argue that the dynamics of capitalism can be quite satisfactorily explained in price terms only, they still have to use unobservable "theoretical prices" or "accounting prices" and not just actual observable market prices, but these unobservable "theoretical prices" are in substance just economic values, which relate prices in the medium of time on the assumption that specific prices, specific price relations and specific temporal intervals are relevant to valuation. The most basic reason for the existence and utility of objective economic values in economics, quite apart from prices, resides in the fact that at any point in time the majority of assets or goods, owned by producers, distributors and consumers, are withdrawn from the market and not offered for sale. They do have values - nobody says they don't have objective economic value, because they could be sold - but not actual market prices, only theoretical (or hypothetical, potential) prices. For me this fact was made very clear when I was a Phd student - at that time, the New Zealand government decided to sell off a lot of state-owned forest, a lot of it planted by unemployed workers in the 1930s depression. The problem they had was, that they didn't have a clue about what that forest was worth, they had never calculated a price for it, only for cut timber, and they had to get consultants in to estimate a realistic market value for the forests. However, once the forests had been given a price, then there was no problem anymore, they could be sold and that price could then rise or fall in accordance with pulp and timber prices, land rents and so forth. Jurriaan
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