>The sort of technical discussions on OPE-L, some of which are arcane, are
>not necessary for everyone to grasp. The term "transformation problem"
>should, I submit, always be put in inverted commas, because critics and
>doubters of marxism like to emphasise what they see as the problematic
>nature of marxism. IMO through failing to see Marx's calculations as
>illustrative of the fundamental forces which he is describing in a
>dialectical model they want exact literal translations, expecting a living
>economy to work like a piece of clockwork machinery. Who problematises
>whom, is one of the basic rules in politics.
I think that most of the reason why discussions of the so-called
"transformation problem" are arcane is that people want them to be so -- or
that they don't really get Marx's point. (Part of the problem arises from
Marx's unfinished presentation, in which he imitates Ricardian theory a
bit, encouraging people to think that price theory is important to his point.)
I think the "problem" should be renamed the "disaggregation problem." In
volume I of CAPITAL, Marx is discussing abstract capitalism as a whole, or
"capital in general": In this story, an abstract representative capitalist
that has the shared characteristics of all individual capitalists but none
of their differences -- Moneybags -- is struggling against abstract labor,
to exploit the latter and to accumulate further wealth and power, in a
veritable one-sided class war (illustrated with historical evidence). In
volume III, he addresses the fact that there are major differences
(heterogeneity) amongst the "many capitals," while the competition among
them distorts the appearance of volume I's "big picture," so that the
participants of the system don't clearly see the nature of the totality.
In the "macro" picture of volume I, there are no relevant relative prices
of commodities (except that of output vs. labor-power), so that the usual
topic of "transformation problem" discussions is irrelevant. The discussion
of volume III is about how relative prices distribute value and
surplus-value among the different capitalists, so that even those whose
operations don't lead to the production of surplus-value (such as pure
money-lenders) can claim a chunk of the aggregate surplus-value as profits.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
