From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Sun Jan 29 2006 - 12:58:57 EST
Fred wrote: > >Secondly, you call this expression the "value" of commodities. >But isn't it an expression of the price of production of >commodities? Or do you want to interpret (as I sense from >your other messages) that the value of commodities IS the >price of production of commodities? If so, then I think >this is a mistake, which obliterates the crucial distinction >between the surplus-value produced in each industry and >the average profit received in each industry. Yes, I think we should obliterate this discussion even though Marx was committed to it. In fact I don't think your or Marx's macro theory is macro enough! Surplus value is not first produced at the level of individual capitals or even individual branches. Surplus value is a macro-economic magnitude produced by the transindividual subject the working class. In a recent message I wrote: To my mind, surplus value is not produced at the level of individual capitals or even branches. For this implies that if one were to take away some individual capitals or a whole branch, then surplus value would be reduced accordingly. But the capitalist totality is more than a sum of its parts (it is not a Cartesian totality, to use Stephen Cullenberg's term), for said taking away may not just reduce surplus value but destroy the system as such--there would be no surplus value at all. Just as we say that moving a heavy table is not the work of the individuals Jim and Bob but of the collective or transindividual subject Jim-and-Bob, surplus value is not produced by separate workforces at individual capitals. Surplus value is produced by the collective working class. It is a macro phenomenon produced by a transindividual subject (I think Lucien Goldmann's theory of the transindividual subject may be one of the most important contributions to Marxist philosophy); surplus value is appropriated at the level of the totality. Marx's social ontology is based on the reality of transindividual subjects. Methodological individualist Marxism is an impossibility. > >I think there is a bit of confusion here. The expression >m[(1+r)(c+v)] seems to suggest that c and v are defined in >units of labor-time, and are transformed into quantities of money >by multiplying them by m (i.e. the MELT). > But I argue that >c and v are instead defined in units of money - as the two >components of the initial money capital M at the beginning >of the circulation of capital. So m is superfluous in your >expression. No, no I meant the opposite. c, v and r are all money sums, so we have money prices of production [(1+r)(c+v)], and if we want to know the abstract labor time that this money price of production represents-- that is, if we want to know the commodity's value, the abstract labor time it represents--then we must know the value of money, i.e. the labor time represented by the monetary magnitude price of production. I say price of production converted back into labor time is the value and the supply price of the commodity; it differs from but regulates the actual exchange value of the commodity as expressed in its market price. Ian then raises the hoary question--how is the value of money determined or how is the monetary expression of labor time expressed. Ajit has taken it as a dodge that Marx arbitrarily fixed it in his theoretical investigation. But why this is more arbitrary than wishing money away or having price expressed in the standard commodity as numeraire has not been clear. Moreover, there has been no careful response to Naples', your and my arguments that the purchasing price of money is not determined as it is with other commodities whose value is regulated in exchange by its price of production. Or rather money is not like most commodities in that its purchasing power does not allow for the making of an average rate of profit. Indeed Allin has even granted this point. Yours, Rakesh
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