Michael Perlman and Michael Williams:
I think Michael W. is agreeing with Michael P. in the posts reproduced
below. Thus, I suppose my comments are addressed to both of you.
Would it not be a good idea to show the "dead end"? I tend to agree
matters concerning value, price, and their relationships become quite
confused when it comes to depreciation. The elaborate models never
include fixed capital, depreciation and technical change in any meaningful
sense. Instead, we have Roemer's non-depreciating fixed capital in one
model or Schefold's unchanging techniques in another.
But I'm not sure this in itself shows the "dead end." Indeed, I would
still like to check out the work Marx was doing in 1868 concerning
depreciation to which Michael P. has previously refered and which
I have not yet tracked down. However, regardless of what that search
yields, proving that it is a "dead end" is a task worth carrying out.
John
On Sat, 27 Apr 1996 Michael Williams <100417.2625@compuserve.com> said:
>Michael (nice name that) P. writes:
> A good number of our posts suggest that we can deduce an
>algebraic formula for values. I consider that approach to lead us to a
dead
>end.
>
>
>Michael W.:
>Quite! And why might this be? Perhaps, said the foxy old Hegelian,
because
>the
>value-form is that which (tendentially) captures all e-VALU-ation in the
>bourgeois epoch. We can still (just) grasp what Shakespeare was getting at
>when
>having Falstaff discuss the possibilites of putting a price on 'honour',
and
>we
>can still laugh at Wilde's quip about knowing the price of everything and
the
>value of nothing; but for how long will these distinctions keep their
meaning?
>Bourgeois society increasingly stamps its good-houskeeping seal of
approval on
>human activity only in the form of the price that its commodity can
>systematically command in the market. The onward march of commodification
>leaves
>fewer and fewer things which it is not acceptable to value in terms of
>trade-offs. But still the basis of these trade-offs is (inter)-subjective
-
>albeit by subjects tendentially homogenized by the sanctions and
incentives of
>bourgeois social structure.
>
>Comradely greetings,
>
>
>Michael W.
>
>