From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Sat Mar 24 2007 - 14:16:23 EDT
Ian wrote: > > >It is hard not to wonder whether the rejection of simultaneous >determination is simply a convenient immunizing strategy. But we can >do better than that, no? Modern equilibrium economists, Marxist included, have read Marx as admitting that he needed to transform his inputs into the same prices of production as his outputs. But Marx never said that he should have and failed to transform his inputs into the same prices of production as his outputs. Marx had no such concept of equilibrium price which for him meant only a tendency towards profit rate equalization, not stationary prices. Marx said that he should not have assumed that the value transferred from the means of production could be identified with cost price of the used up means of production. From this admission does not follow the imperative to generate neoclassical or Sraffian equilibrium prices in which input and output prices are the same. The search in Marx's own text for admissions for the need for a neoclassical or Sraffian theory of equilibrium price is futile. It is a misreading; it is a strategy for those whose formation is professional economics to make Marx a professional economist and to have give his imprimatur to this mischievous misreading. Rakesh
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