In reply to OPE-L 4989.
Well, Steve, not only have you not studied the TSSI well enough to
be throwing stones, but you don't even know what you think you
know. That is, what you assert out of ignorance is simply
incorrect.
I thought I had corrected your misunderstanding in the past, and
that you responded that you would keep my points in mind when you
finally got down to studying our work. But now you're coming back
with the same incorrect stuff, apparently before you have studied
our work.
I'm referring to your comment that "if Marx's transformation of
values into prices doesn't work in a system of simultaneous
equations, then it won't work in a dynamic system as well." I'm
also referring to your comment in OPE-L 4887: "By allowing
technical change (and other factors as well), you can maintain a
consistency between the claim that labor is the only source of
value, and the price dynamics of a multi-sectoral economy. ...
[This] brings in a level of arbitrariness which may appear to make
the elaborated system (multi-commodity) consistent with its
precept (labor as the only source of value), but which makes it
impossible to have any structured analysis of any issue beyond
that."
Of course, when you wrote OPE-L 4887 -- only ONE WEEK ago -- you
conceded that "this is a perspective garnered from reading OPE
posts rather than the original Kliman/Freeman/etc papers, so I may
be misrepresenting to some extent (I'll know for sure when I
finally have time to read the originals)."
For the record:
First, the TSSI does not vindicate Marx's account of the
transformation of values into prices of production by invoking
some sort of perpetual disequilibrium. As we interpret his
concepts, his transformation of values into prices DOES work in a
system of simultaneous equations.
Second, we do not refute the Okishio theorem, and thereby
vindicate the logical coherence of Marx's law of the tendential
fall in the profit rate, by invoking unequal profit rates across
sectors. Marx's logic succeeds, and the Okishio theorem fails,
even when profit rates are always and everywhere equal. You don't
need to take my word for it. In the latest volume of _Research in
Political Economy_, Duncan Foley writes (p. 282): "I understand
Freeman and Kliman to be arguing that Okishio's theorem as
literally stated is wrong because it is possible for the money and
labor rates of profit to fall under the circumstances specified in
its hypotheses. I accept their examples as establishing this
possibility."
Andrew ("Drewk") Kliman
Dept. of Social Sciences
Pace University
Pleasantville, NY 10570 USA
phone: (914) 773-3968
fax: (914) 773-3951
Home: 60 W. 76th St. #4E
New York, NY 10023 USA
"The practice of philosophy is itself theoretical. It is the
critique that measures the individual existence by the essence,
the particular reality by the Idea."
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