From: Fred Moseley (fmoseley@MTHOLYOKE.EDU)
Date: Fri Jun 02 2006 - 09:31:12 EDT
Hi Jurrian, thanks for these passages and your comments. A few comments below. On Wed, 31 May 2006, Jurriaan Bendien wrote: > Fred Moseley wrote: > > "These two aggregate equalities are not conditional > equalities, that may or may not be true, depending on the compositions of > capital of individual industries (as in the standard interpretation of > Marx's theory), but are instead identities, that are always true, by > assumption, or by the nature of Marx's logical method - the determination > of the total surplus-value prior to its distribution." > > Fred's description has got to be correct basically, but I would say that the > two aggregate equalities are true "by assumption", specifically a modelling > assumption made to understand a complex reality. Lateron both Marx and > Engels qualified that assumption: > > K. Marx: > > " The sum of average profit plus ground-rent can never be greater than the > magnitude of which they are components and which exists before this > division. It is therefore immaterial for our discussion whether the entire > surplus-value of the commodities, i.e., all the surplus-labour contained in > the commodities, is realised in their price or not. The surplus-labour is > not entirely realised if only for the reason that due to a continual change > in the amount of labour socially necessary to produce a certain commodity, > resulting from the constant change in the productiveness of labour, some > commodities are always produced under abnormal conditions and must, > therefore, be sold below their individual value. At any rate, profit plus > rent equal the total realised surplus-value (surplus-labour), and for > purposes of this discussion the realised surplus-value may be equated to all > surplus-value; for profit and rent are realised surplus-value, or, generally > speaking, the surplus-value which passes into the prices of commodities, > thus in practice all the surplus-value forming a constituent part of this > price." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch49.htm Yes, Marx's theory of the distribution of surplus-value in Vol. 3 assumes that all the total surplus-value is realized. This is still an abstract theory, which explains how the total surplus-value is divided up into its individual component parts. In the passage quoted, the total surplus-value is divided into average profit and rent. The subject of unrealized surplus-value, due to lack of demand, is a subject for a lower level of abstraction, beyond the three volumes of Capital. An important point for me from this passage that the total surplus-value is assumed to exist prior to its division into individual parts, and thus the total surplus-value is assumed to be theoretically determined prior to its division into individual parts. Marx made similar statements on the previous page and on the following page, and throughout Volume 3 and all the various drafts of Capital. This is why the total surplus-value must by assumption be equal to the total profit. > I tend to think the "transformation problem" difficulty partly results from > the fact that: > > (1) Marx doesn't really discuss all the different forms prices can take > (real prices, ideal prices, future prices etc.), and I think you are right about this. Prices of production in vol. 3 are long-run equilibrium prices, which assume that S = D. > (2) he doesn't clearly demonstrate why the concept of (aggregate) "price" > logically presupposes the concept of "value". In the tradition of the > political economists, he simply defines price as the monetary expression of > exchange-value. I think Marx does demonstrate this, in Chapter 1 of Vol. 1, which is a long way from the transformation problem. Comradely, Fred
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