A quick further comment on Alejandro's "discovery" of the missing paragraph
in Chapter 9, which I continue to find very interesting.
It is a real mystery to me why Engels omitted the paragraph that Alejandro
has discovered in Marx's original manuscript. In part because Engels
apparently made very few changes, especially deletions, to Marx's manuscript
(the main changes were additions). It would be interesting to know if there
are any more changes in the rest of Chapter 9, and indeed in the rest of
Part 2. On the other hand, I do not think that Engels understood enough of
what Marx was doing to deliberately "supress" this paragraph in order to
change Marx's meaning. If Engels did this, why did he not also "supress"
the paragraph in Chapter 12 ("Supplementary Remarks") that I discussed in
(3587) that says essentially the same thing, with the same equations? Maybe
this was just somehow just a chance omission (which is also hard to
believe). If other significant paragraphs turn up missing, then that would
be much more suspicious.
In any case, I am very glad that Alejandro has discovered the missing
paragraph because I think it adds an important piece of evidence to the
"single-system" interpretation.
The exact location of the missing paragraph is also very interesting. It is
just before several paragraphs on commodities produced with capitals of the
average composition and is therefore part of this discussion, just like the
paragraphs cited by me from Chapter 12. The main point of both discussions
is that that the value of these "average" commodities is equal to their
prices of production. This equality of value and price is possible only if
the "cost price" component is the same for both the value and the price of
these "average" commodities, as Marx explicitly stated in both discussions.
This equality of the cost-price that is true for "average" commodities is
also true for all other commodities. As Alejandro has pointed out, this
equality of the cost-price for non-average commodities is explicitly stated
by Marx in the missing paragraph and in the paragraph that follows it.
Therefore, these two passages provide consistent and complementary support
for this important point.
Comradely,
Fred