re 4465 >Rakesh wrote in [OPE-L:4464]: > >> Though a neo Ricardian, Allin does not understand this basic >> difference between determination and resolution in Marx. > >How are you using this expression "Neo-Ricardian" here? I suspect >that Allin would not agree that he is a "Neo-Ricardian", i.e. that >he is an advocate of a "surplus approach" perspective. Jerry, I do not want my distinction between determination and resolution to get lost, so I am willing to drop the expression. I meant by neo Ricardian here only to call up Ricardo's critique of Smith's adding up theory of value, which Marx takes over in TSV. So cost price and surplus value are not added up to arrive at total value (C) but rather total value (C) is resolved into cost price (k) and surplus value (s) which are inversely related. This is done at the very beginning of vol 3. So (1)C => k + s, then (2)k+a= C - (s-a) The formula is not (3) k + s => C, Which Marx calls an irrational expression in TSVII so it does not necessarily follow that (4) (k + a) + s => C + a Which is the B-S-Cottrell transformation result. "Yet the category of cost price has nothing to do with the formation of commodity value...Our investigation will show, however, that cost price does none the less, in the economy of capital, present the false semblance of an actual category of value production." (Capital 3, p. 119) [Note Alejandro] Since the value of the output remained a fixed magnitude, they should have arrived at the following formula in Ricardian and Marxian terms. (5) C= (k + a) + (s - a) Of course there could be more labor objectified in the means of production which allows for more surplus labor to be absorbed from live labor. Then you could get (6) C + a = [(k + .xa) + (s + [1 - .x]a)] On to other matters, Of course Allin has also defended a less roundabout or direct labor theory of value, which seems self consciously to be Ricardian in inspiration. He has even said that such a strategy seems preferrable given the putative logical defects in Marx's theory that the law of value asserts itself in the form of the average rate of profit. There are no such defects. It is a matter of the sociology of knowledge why Marx was ever put in simultaneous equations and thought to have suffered from a transformation problem. In that sociology the tremendously destructive role of Marxist economists should be highlighted, just as in history of Communism the destruction wrought by Bolshevism should get pride of place. See Mattick Sr Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie? (ME Sharpe, 1983) All the best, Rakesh
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