> Date: Sun, 22 Feb 98 21:49:20 UT
> From: andrew kliman <Andrew_Kliman@CLASSIC.MSN.COM>
> Reply-To: ope-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu
> To: ope-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu
> Subject: RE: Marx and historical costs
>
> A reply to the PIAF:
>
> ----------
> From: owner-ope-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu on behalf of Fred B. Moseley
> Sent: Friday, February 20, 1998 2:19 PM
> To: OPE list
> Subject: Re: Marx and historical costs
>
>
> Excuse me, Fred, your methodological slip is showing.
>
> You've been using the "never any explicit statement in all of Marx's writing"
> response to justify your interpretation against ours.
>
> Yet when we talked about the "revenue" issue, at one point you suddenly came
> up with a "third" sense in which Marx uses the term. If there's "never any
> explicit statement in all of Marx's writing that he is considering more than
> one concept of the rate of profit," I'm also pretty sure there's "never any
> explicit statement in all of Marx's writing that he is defining 'revenue' in a
> third sense."
>
> So you can't use the "explicit statement" response. Therefore you can't
> disqualify my multiple measures of profitability argument by saying that your
> evidence is explicit and mine isn't. You'll have to deal with the logical and
> conceptual issues, not only Marx's actual words.
>
>
> Andrew Kliman
>
>
Andrew, these two cases are not comparable. In the "revenue"
case, Marx once explicitly defined revenue as the difference
between the price of output of one period and the costs of
production in the next period. In the "historical cost" case,
Marx never explicitly said that, in the case of technological
change, constant capital is valued at historical costs. And he
said the opposite (constant capital is valued at current costs)
many times.
But, as I just said in my response to Jurriaan's question, there
are still some open related questions which I intend to continue to
think about and discuss. Maybe there can be more agreement on
these questions.
Comradely,
Fred
P.S. My main point about "revenue" still stands: even though
Marx did use the term revenue in the above sense in one
passage, this passage had nothing to do with the transformation
problem. In all of Marx's discussion of the transformation
problem (or the determination of prices of production), Marx
never used this concept. Andrew's interpretation of the
transformation problem depends crucially on this concept of
revenue, which is not to be found in Marx's writings on the
subject.