[OPE] Sytematic Dialectic of the Value-form

Yes it is interesting how you could make these different kinds of interesting distinctions, and see things in different ways - just following your own interest in this. Happily, should you lose interest, and get bored with it, there are always other conceptual adjustments yoiu could make, that could be stimulating. Life can be very fulfilling in this sense, surely.

I had to think of Marx's comment on Herr Szeliga:

The ordinary man does not think he is saying anything extraordinary when he states that there are apples and pears. But when the philosopher expresses their existence in the speculative way, he says something extraordinary. He performs a miracle by producing the real natural objects, the apple, the pear, etc., out of the unreal creation of the mind "the Fruit", i.e., by creating those fruits out of his own abstract reason, which he considers as an Absolute Subject outside himself, represented here as "the Fruit". And in regard to every object the existence of which he expresses, he accomplishes an act of creation. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch05.htm#5.2

The "value-form theory" consists essentially of the idea that abstract labour (work in general, "work" as "just work") is constituted at the moment of economic exchange (trade), and is grounded in exchange - abstract labour cannot have any reality *prior* to exchange, or *beyond* exchange.

This theory solidly reflects the viewpoint of bourgeois Marxism, and tries to show its intellectual sophistication and profundity by "deducing" this Idea via metaphysical reasoning and linguistic apposition.

If there is no necessary relationship between values and prices at all, then obviously as Mino Carchedi validly argues, there cannot be any "transformation problem" either, but then there is also no distinctively Marxian price theory, only a moral criticism of the deleterious effect of commerce on human beings. We could then just slip in a bit of good old post-Keynesian chartalism, for example.

The real problem for economic science, as I see it, is that the theory of value, the theory of price, the theory of money, and the theory of finance are all logically connected - and that they both influence, and are influenced by, presuppositions about what a "market" is in the first place. That is one of the topics I am researching (but I am not a rich academic in de Dutch feudal bureaucracy, nor can I do my research without being harassed and getting my stuff stolen).

In bourgeois economics it does not matter if you are eclectic, and indeed this is praised as "creative". It is interesting how you could make these different kinds of interesting distinctions, and see things in different ways - just following your own interest in this. Happily, should you lose interest, and get bored with it, there are always other conceptual adjustments yoiu could make, that could be stimulating. Life can be very fulfilling in this sense, surely.

Jurriaan

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Received on Tue Dec 9 04:52:55 2008