On Mon, 21 Mar 1994 16:24:51 -0800 Allin said:
>This is strictly tangential to my "LTV Defense" postings, but I'm
>afraid I can't resist rising to Jim Devine's bait (3/21/94). Jim says
>that while my LTV stuff is "interesting," and possibly even right,
>nonetheless it is "not Marx". Well, at one level it is not supposed
>to be "Marx" as such: it is supposed to be a critical, modern
>reconstruction of what I find valid and important in Marx's LTV.
I am totally sympathetic to Allin's project: I, too, am trying to
present a critical reconstruction of what I find valid and
important in Marx's law of value, based on research done since
the old man went to the workers' commune in the sky. I think,
however, that we disagree concerning what's valuable and valid
in Marx's law of value.
For the record, just because something "isn't Marx" does not make
it automatically wrong (or right, for that matter). I don't like
appeals to authority as a way of proving anything. There were
lots of incorrect things in Marx, while I can think of many
writers (such as many feminists and environmentalists) who have
had a lot of useful things to contribute
on issues where Marx didn't have much to say. I had hoped
that my phrasing implied that my view of the MTV (similar to
Mike Lebowitz's view) might be *complementary* to Allin's
theorizing. Just because something is Ricardian as opposed to
Marxian does not mean that it is wrong.
>But it *is* supposed to be in the spirit of Marx, and so Jim's
>remark rankles. I throw back the charge. Jim may wish that
>Marx had been some kind of "pure" critical social theorist,
>uncontaminated by any commitment to a crude Ricardian LTV,
>but it just ain't so.
I wasn't hoping that Marx was simply a "critical theorist."
To me, the points are (1) it's important to understand Marx's
theory of commodity fetishism if one wants to understand his
law of value and its purposes and (2) its purposes went beyond
a critique of political economy and a critique of capitalism.
To my mind, Marx's law of value says something about capitalism's
laws of
motion, for example about crisis theory. Whereas values
help describe the socialized nature of production (how
capitalism is an interconnected, interdependent, society),
people act on the basis of prices (not prices of production,
mind you, but market prices). This can mean a contradiction
of the sort Engels wrote about: between socialized production
and individualized appropriation. In crude terms, the
anarchy of production.
> Drawn from among many possible counter-
>examples, I offer the following (from Capital, III, Moscow
>edition, p. 177): "Whatever the manner in which the prices of
>various commodities are first mutually fixed or regulated, their
>movements are always regulated by the law of value. If the
>labour-time required for their production happens to shrink, prices
>fall; if it increases, prices rise, provided other conditions remain
>the same." Straightforward, no-nonsense, robust stuff.
I agree with this statement, since it was properly
qualified with a ceteris paribus clause. It isn't as straightforward
as it appears, though: did he say that as values rise, prices rise
to exactly the same extent? But this issue is minor.
What I disagree with is the vision of
Marx's law of value as being *primarily* a price theory. In my
interpretation, the deviations between prices and values are
important, too. They distort the appearances of capitalist
reality, helping to legitimate the system: if prices
corresponded exactly to values, then the exploitative nature
of the system would be obvious to all. We wouldn't need all
of this hard-to-read abstraction in vol. I, chs. 1-3. (BTW,
I'm not putting anyone down here: I have a hard time reading
these chapters myself.)
> None of
>Jim's malarkey about (so far as I could make out) the
^^^^^^^^
what language! But it's not *my* malarkey. There have been
several articles in CAPITAL & CLASS about this subject. If
you wish, I'll find citations for you. In the lingo,
a commodity has both a value and a value-form. The
value-form is crudely put, the price, the way the participants
of the system see it. The former (value) is the
social content, which I understand as how the commodity looks
from the perspective of capital in general, in what might be
termed the "social factory" (the perspective of vol. I of
CAPITAL).
>simultaneous determination of price and value in each and every
>market transaction: changes in socially-necessary labor-content
>are conceptually prior to, and serve to explain, price movements.
>When Marx repeats this point, a couple of pages later, it is
>bracketed by two positive references to Ricardo. Come on, Jim,
>who is re-writing history here?
I'll let others argue about "what Marx really said" or "what
Marx really meant." I'm no good at Marxology: I am neither
trying to write or re-write the history of Marx's views.
Trying to find what's valid in Marx, I interpret
Marx's quotes about values being prior to prices in the
following way: Marx was arguing that if one wants to understand
individual behavior and consciousness, the prices of individual
commodities, etc., one has to first understand the social (socio-
logical) nature of the capitalist mode of production. Marx thought
that values (and vol. I's assumption that prices are proportional
to values) revealed this social nature. (As I said elsewhere, I'm
not convinced that this mode of presentation was the best.)
Now I am not going to deny that Marx tried to show the mathematical
nature of the connection between value and prices of production.
Obviously, there's the
famous "transformation problem" discussion (vol. III, ch. 9)
where Marx made his famous error trying to show this connection.
This discussion fit in with his Ricardian tradition which he
never rejected completely (after all, he learned from Malthus,
despite all of the scorn he heaped on that guy). In view of
my efforts to present a critical reconstruction of what I find
valid in Marx, I don't find this discussion very useful (especially
because of the focus on equilibrium states, which became an
obsession in post-Marx presentations of the transformation problem:
Farjoun and Machover are a massive step beyond this obsession, as
is Allin's set of propositions over pen-l).
Instead, I have focussed on the macrosocietal connections between
the value accounting framework and the price accounting framework,
versions of which Marx used in this discussion:
the sum of all prices (net of raw material and intermediate costs)
= the sum of all values (net of the same). and:
the sum of all profits = the sum of all surplus-value.
the comments in parentheses come from the so-called "New Solution"
to the transformation problem of Dumenil, Lipietz, and Foley. Both
of these equations assume that values and prices have been stated in
the same units. The equations apply for the entire society.
In my interpretation of what's valid in Marx, these equations
summarize the societal situation in which individuals find
themselves: a firm that sells its product above value is
gaining surplus-value via redistribution from others selling
below value. In order to actually create surplus-value instead
of getting it at another capitalist's expense, a firm must
hire labor-power and get it to work beyond what's necessary to
pay for its cost. More correctly, the social conditions must
be in place that allow such exploitation to occur (when free
wage labor prevails, this is the separation
of the direct producers from the means of production and
the means of subsistence).
Enough! If you want all of this is a more logical order, see my
"The Utility of Value: the 'New Solution,' Unequal Exchange, and
Crisis" in RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY, vol. 12, 1990.
Again, this is not Marxology, but an effort to reconstruct
what's valid in Marx's law of value. Comments and criticisms
are welcome even though it's already been published. (I
want to rewrite it for a book some time, especially since
Rudy Fichtenbaum found a silly mathematical error.)
in pen-l solidarity,
Jim Devine BITNET: jndf@lmuacad INTERNET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ., Los Angeles, CA 90045-2699 USA
310/338-2948 (off); 310/202-6546 (hm); FAX: 310/338-1950
