From: Jerry Levy (Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Wed Oct 19 2005 - 21:20:30 EDT
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <adsl675281@tiscali.nl> Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2005 1:43 PM Subject: [OPE-L] Capital in General I'd agree with Fred Moseley insofar as Marx argues the value of labour-products, as distinct from their price, exists both prior to and after exchange. It would be impossible for example for living labor to transfer value from fixed assets to the new output, if value did not exist after exchange. The two identities of total output value and total output prices, and total profit and total surplus-value were only a theoretical construct (a model), as both Marx and Engels explicitly say (though this is ignored by many scholars); in reality, as Marx and Engels both explicitly note, there was no such exact mathematical identity. Marx seems to have thought that assuming those two identities was justified, because he believed that in reality their quantitative divergences would not be so great; price-value divergences would not be so great in most cases. The whole notion of a uniform rate of profit (or general rate of profit) refers to an *idealisation*, a result towards which the competitive process would *tend* to move, yet, Marx's discussion of the competitive process is very fragmentary. Marx's habit was to say, "first you must analyse the phenomenon in its idealised, pure form, despite all sorts of empiria that seemingly contradict it, because if you cannot do even that, you cannot explain much at all." Ultimately, he argues, the capitalistic competitive process is about maximising one's private share of the total surplus-value produced, and that is the correct basis for building a theory of how that competition occurs. However, with the expansion of foreign trade, the price-value divergences mentioned will increase, and what is left undiscussed, is what Marx himself terms "profit upon alienation" occurring outside the sphere of the production and distribution of newly created surplus-value. A surplus value or profit may also be obtained, through a redistribution of already existing goods, but if Marx is correct, this represents not a net addition to total surplus value, but a transfer of value, a redistribution of it. But this value transfer is theoretically problematic, it deserves to be much better theorized than it has been. Also note that at any point in time, the bulk of labour-products are not being traded at all - they have a value, but no actual market price, at best an ideal one. Personally, I think that Marx's theory does not concern an "accounting theory of value and price", but a theory of a real social process, which we can only imperfectly describe with social accounting procedures; consequently, there exists no mathematical operation which can prove Marx's theory correct, at best, it can make the discussion of what we are talking about more exact, or elucidate logical implications, or empirically (probabilistically) corroborate the theory. If Marx's theory has explanatory power, it must be, because it makes sense of the facts of observable experience (this is a "Lakatosian" interpretation, with the proviso that Imre Lakatos leaves out the social determination of scientific theories, as I think Larry Laudan, Andrew Gamble and Thomas Kuhn among others pointed out). In Marx's dialectical description of capital, there are actually many kinds of "transformations" (Verwandlungen), not just one as his critics claim, and they all refer to the practical resolution or mediation of a contradiction existing as a practical reality, which is reflected in thought as contradicting categories. These transformations include, just going by the contents list of Das Kapital: - the transformation of the general form of value into the money form - the transformation of money into capital - the transformation of the value of labour-power into wages - the transformation of surplus value into profit - the transformation of the rate of surplus value into the rate of profit - the transformation of profit into average profit - the transformation of commodity values into prices of production - the transformation of commodity capital into commercial capital - the tranformation of money-capital into finance capital - the transformation of surplus profit into ground rent These ten types of transformations, specified by Marx, described "logically-historically" (to use Ronald Meek's term) the process whereby capital, which historically originates in circulation (although many Marxists dispute this still), gradually - i.e. across six centuries - "engulfs" (to use Kozo Uno's term) the whole production process of society, causing new economic relations to become established, which require *all* the mercantile categories devised by the political economists to be modified, relativised and revised. You could refer to this process as marketisation or market expansion, but that is not quite accurate, because the markets are specifically *capitalist* markets, i.e. markets based on capitalist private property. I am sure that if Marx has lived longer and written more, he would have found even more "transformations". Jurriaan
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