From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Mon Mar 26 2007 - 19:13:04 EDT
Allin wrote: > >I'm talking about the status of the input prices Marx used when >setting up his examples. These are not "given" is any real sense, >Marx has made them up. > He gets to decide what they're supposed to >represent. > He may be tempted to choose (b), but if he does so >this would seem to undermine his argument: he's lost contact with >the value basis. He's trying to demonstrate the relationship >between values and prices (of production), not the relationship >between prices and prices. That the explanandum is indeed the relationship between prices and prices or rather intertemporal changes in profits and prices is as clear as day if one only reads the whole chapter. What we have are prices and their movements. Marx is interested in the changes of prices of production and the profit rate. That is what has to be explained. Because prices of production conceal their basis in value, it is not easily ascertainable how changes in prices and the profit rate reflect changes in value relations, viz. a tendency for falling profit rate reflects a decline in new value relative to dead labor in the system as a whole and differential labor productivity is generally reflected in changes in exchange ratios. Marx never says that he begins with value prices and needs to or should have transformed them along with the outputs into the same prices of production. Marx evinces no interest in transforming the outputs and inputs into the same price of production. He never said that this needs to be done and that he failed to do it. Indeed in a fetishistic economy we can never begin with transparent value magnitudes, and he did not so begin. He began with cost prices, the sum of money capitalists lay out to commence production Marx shows that whatever prices were paid for the mop purchased directly and the mos purchased indirectly, the prices of production are governed by and conceal value. And as I already: if prices of production don't change in the course of production and realization of commodities, when do they change? Rakesh
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