1. At this point I shall digress briefly to cover a flank, i.e. to address a
concern that I suspect many students of Marxism may have.
2. I appear to be treating the LTV and the Sraffian system as
alternative theories of (the "systematic component" of) relative prices.
But isn't this to miss the point? Wasn't Marx's Capital subtitled a
Critique of Political Economy, not a Continuation of same? How can I
bracket Ricardo and Marx as proponents of the LTV when Marx was
concerned to explode Ricardo, not merely to second him? (I think Jim
Devine has something like this in mind, and perhaps others too.)
3. There is some force in this objection, but I think it is overdone.
True, Marx's primary object was not to develop a theory of relative
prices. He wanted to lay bare the basis of profit in the capitalist
exploitation of labor, to discern the "laws of motion" of capitalism, and
to demonstrate that capitalism is a historically transient mode of
production, whose internal contradictions necessarily propel it in the
direction of its supercession by socialism. From this standpoint, the
LTV was but a stepping stone towards a theory of *surplus value* --
something quite foreign to Ricardo. And, it may be said, whatever is
valid or salvageable from among the latter ambitions may be
reconstructed without appeal to the LTV.
4. This last claim I will tackle shortly. For the moment I want to point
out that although a theory of relative prices was not Marx's central
concern, as such, it does nonetheless play a key role in his work -- if
not in Roemerian reconstructions of it. And it is a valid scientific
question in its own right. (And I might add that Ricardo, too, placed the
LTV in the service of an analysis of the "laws of motion" of capitalism as
he saw them -- e.g. the progress towards the famous "stationary state"
via a falling rate of profit.)
5. Marx's analysis of exploitation assumes that the prices of
commodities in terms of money are in proportion to their labor-values.
There is weak and a strong reading of this assumption. On the weak
reading, it is just an expositional tactic for representing at the level of the
individual factory and the individual worker, social relations that obtain
between the class of workers and the class of capitalists. It projects
onto the *individual* working day a division into surplus and necessary
labour time that is in reality a relationship between parts of the *total
social working day*. This is divided between time spent in industries
producing workers' consumer goods and time spend producing goods
used by the capitalists. The weak position would say that these
conditions of projection need not hold empirically for the thesis about
the social totality to be valid.
6. The strong position would state that the conditions of projection are
more or less empirically valid, in the sense that there is such a strong
correlation between the prices of commodities and their values that
what is true at the social level is also true at the micro level.
7. Hence, although the principal concern of Marx in his famous chapter
on the commodity may have been the analysis of the *social form* of
value, this does not indicate that he was unconcerned with the empirical
relationship between price and value. Generally he held that movements
in price reflected movements in value. This indeed was the specific
form of representation of the category value (abstract social labour) in
capitalist society. The essence of this form of representation was that
there was a homomorphism between the structure of prices and the
structure of values. Marx of course allows for disturbing elements --
temporary imbalances of supply and demand, differing organic
compositions of capital between branches, etc. -- but the existence of
these distorting factors no more invalidates the underlying hypothesis
than the reality of air resistance invalidated Galileo's theory of falling
bodies. The claim is that the underlying tendency will produce clear
measurable effects, which can be distinguished from the effects of the
disturbing factors.
[Paras 5-7 above are based on notes made by Paul Cockshott.]
End of third posting.
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Allin Cottrell
Department of Economics
Wake Forest University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(910) 759-5762
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