[OPE-L:3210] Re: IVA and all that

Steve Keen (s.keen@uws.edu.au)
Tue, 1 Oct 1996 13:37:15 -0700 (PDT)

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Re:

> I reject the blanket statement that Marx "used 2 or 3 sectors." He examined
> one particular problem by dividing social production into 2 --- NOT 3 ---
> departments (this is an important point, if one wants to understand what the
> reproduction schema were really about).

True, his numerical and analytic examination was couched in 2 sectors,
not 3; but he did notionally divide into 3 sectors (worker consumption,
capitalist consumption, capital production) beforehand. And agreed, he
did do most of his work in what we would today call a one-sector model.

But the one-sector model was immune to Sraffa-inspired critiques because
one sector has a single capital/labor ratio, and hence there is no
problem of divergence of value from price. It takes 2 sectors to develop
the critique of simultaneous valuation, which is why I don't see that a
one-sector TSS is significant.

On your initial point that you are using "prices" to mean "the monetary
expression of value", is this intended to show that Marx's
non-transformation of input-values into prices of production in III/9
was a valid exercise?