[OPE-L:7107] [OPE-L:606] Re: Re: equilibrium and non-equilibrium

Gerald Levy (glevy@pratt.edu)
Fri, 5 Mar 1999 13:50:09 -0500 (EST)

A brief digressive comment Alan's [685]:

> I think that is one of the reasons that Marx himself doesn't use the word
> 'natural price'; that's why he doesn't say "I'm doing natural prices,
> better than Ricardo"; he says "I'm doing something else, superior to
> Ricardo".

A simpler explanation might be that Marx didn't view (any type of) price
(or anything else associated with capitalist relations of production) as
"natural". Indeed wasn't it one of Marx's criticisms of Ricardo that
for Ricardo social relations were held to be natural and eternal rather
than socially and historically constituted?

[NB: the above doesn't take a position on the question of the similarity
(or non-similarity) of Marx's theory to Ricardo's on the issue of natural
price; rather it deals with the question of the *terminology* selected by
Ricardo and Marx].

In solidarity, Jerry