>
>It's hard to say that Marx's "law of value" is "not true" if one
>doesn't understand it, just as it's hard to say that it's "true" if
>one doesn't understand it. In fact, I think there's a lot of
>questions about what "it" is. One thing is that the "LTV" does _not_
>assert is that "average market prices" equal "labor values." Quite
>the contrary: deviations of prices from values are just as important
>as their connection with each other. Marx was quite conscious before
>he started CAPITAL that values and prices deviated from each other.
>BTW, Duncan Foley's article in the most recent issue of the REVIEW
>OF RADICAL POLITICAL ECONOMICS is quite good on this subject.
>
>Marx's "law of value" is first and foremost NOT a theory of prices.
I was responding to Doug Henwood's statement that:
>Any sense of how representative these sorts of goods are?
>I'd guess that gains from IP are merely redistributions of
>SV - it can't explain an increase in the profit rate in the
>macroecomy. Nike's gain is some other capitalist's loss, no?
If you want to say that Doug is in error: because the labor theory of
value is not a theory of prices, you cannot reason from surplus value
to profits, then we agree.
But in that case, if the LTV has nothing to do with the actual prices
we see, what good is it? Why should we care about it?
Brad DeLong
