At 07:53 AM 3/28/97 -0800, David Laibman wrote:
>Since Alan asks a number of us to weigh in on whether value is determined
>prior to sale, here goes.
>
>My tendency is first to agree -- we are, after all, looking for areas of
>agreement, ;-) -- and say that value (as distinct from market price) is
>determined in the totality of production relations, and its measure is a
>quantity of abstract labor time determined in (and partially determining!)
>those relations. So value (however "transformed") is embodied in commodities
>prior to sale. There is, however, a crucial ambiguity in the concept of
>socially necessary labor: labor is validated as socially necessary when
>commodities complete a circuit of exchange, and their labor content is
>thereby established as acknowledged and necessary.
___________________________
I think the problem can be solved if we use the concept of prices of
production as the 'gravitational point'. In this case, the realization
problem does not affect our calculation of either values or prices of
production. The best reference I know of is: Garegnani's paper in Brown,
Sato, Zarembka (eds.), 'Essays in Modern Capital Theory', year 1976. Cheers,
ajit sinha