From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Sun Mar 25 2007 - 18:46:06 EDT
Paul C wrote >I am unsure as to why people on this list continue to >expend so much effort discussing the transformation problem. There are too many economists on the list. Having been stung by Sraffa, Samuelson turned around and used Sraffa to sting the Marxists. The Sraffians got really excited, thinking that they had a foothold in the economics profession which would allow them to argue for a more "just" distribution of the net product as long as they assented to the war on the Marxists. Hence Marx after Sraffa to which New Left Review gave its name. First the Marxists were driven out by the Marxists, then the Sraffians ignored, leaving them nothing to do but write abstruse ignored mathematical texts and insult Marxists for illogic. Economics is consequently the most right wing social science, making near impossible an academic revival of Marxism within economics departments as Ben Fine has argued. Meanwhile, the other academic lefts have little understanding of the theory of value, dismissing it because it putatively does not apply to immaterial labor or outlier immaterial goods such as software (Negri). Or the left attempts to understand economics only in terms of force and politics--hence, the most expansive definition of primitive accumulation (Harvey). The most interesting attention the theory of value has received is from anthropologists such as Stephen Gudeman and David Graeber and from philosophers such as Chris Arthur in regards to the ontological implications of money and alas from an economist such as Cyrus Bina who has attempted to understand the operation of the law of value on a world wide scale in the oil industry. Marx's transformation exercise is important. You even admit that prices seem to be hovering between value prices and prices of production. The theory of price of production gives expression to the real contradictions of general commodity production which is also capitalist production. The theory has interesting epistemological and political implications. What is most certainly wrong is that Marx ever admitted to the problem in his transformation tables that almost every modern account of his economics has him admitting to. I am glad to have set the record straight on OPE-L. We'll see if anyone listens or proves me wrong. Rakesh
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