From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Mon Mar 26 2007 - 09:19:33 EDT
Well I am not an economist, but I am sympathetic to Paul Cockshott's argument - in my opinion though what is really behind the transformation controversy is the attempt to understand the modus operandi of the law of value in a capitalist economy, and what concepts are really necessary to understand the process of mutual adjustments of labour-time, product-values and market prices (the process of "market balancing" in a competitive setting, as distinct from the presumption of equilibrium). If the motivation of Marxist participants in the TP debate is, to try and prove that relative market prices of new products (trading ratios) are strongly regulated by labour-time, then empirical tests such as we are able to construct are appropriate to corroborate that hypothesis. Because no purely logical proof of that idea is possible. But if the aim is to understand the process of market-balancing thru time, on the hypothesis that it is governed by the law of value, then we need concepts and models to understand and explicate how this determinism actually works out. And here the transformation problem literature is relevant, I think, since it seeks to specify the concepts, conditions and relationships involved more rigorously, tracing out the quantitative implications. Following Marx, Ian Wright thus suggests that if we cannot explain the process in the simplest/purest cases, we cannot explain it at all. Marx suggests in his manuscript that a general rate of profit would be the final, logical outcome of the competitive, market-balancing process, at least "in the purest case". If that case never obtains in reality (he could not verify that), that is not necessarily a problem, the theoretical problem here is to depict consistently what forces will shape the distribution of the surplus-value, and consequently what the developmental dynamic of capitalism will be. The additional scientific problem then concerns to what extent the theorised process of market behaviour is only an idealisation, and to what extent it accurately mirrors the empirically verifiable events - how we would move from a simplified model to a richer kind of analysis that would make sense of the empiria. So if we forget for a moment questions of doctrinal orthodoxy, the real problems in the transformation problem literature concern what has to be modelled, how it is to be modelled, and why - here various foundational arguments are made about logical coherence and consistency. For example, Ian Steedman suggested once that Marx is logically committed to the idea that a product has two different prices depending on whether it is purchased, or whether it is sold, which he regarded as an absurdity. It is possible that there are not one, but many labour theories of value which could be devised. Marx's writing is open to interpretation, and he may have been justified in some assumptions, but not in others. He may have been quite correct in the general thesis that the relative exchange-values of new products in trade, usually expressed by money-prices, are normally proportional to the modal amounts of human labour-time which are currently socially necessary to produce them. But he may have been wrong in his theory of the specific modes of regulation through which that proportionality is established or ultimately asserted. Jurriaan
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