It is difficult to disagree with Fred Moseley's literal interpretation of Marx, insofar as it is only an exact word-for-word repetition of what Marx himself already says. Often he gives the impression that his chief argument is "what Marx says is true, because what Marx says is true."
It never becomes really clear though from his imitation whether his "levels of abstraction" refer only to an epistemic or methodological order of assumptions, or whether they represent an ontological claim about reality. And that is the more substantive issue. If the total mass of surplus value created by workers in production is "fixed" before its distribution, this "fix" could be a methodological assumption in model building, or it could be an ontological claim (along the lines of: no more surplus value is distributed, than that which is produced). If it is an ontological claim, we would have to define exactly what that claim operationally means. Supposing that it is true, that the total mass of surplus value is already fixed before it is distributed, then, logically - if you assume total product prices equal total product values - the average rate of producers' profit on total production capital is also fixed already prior to distribution. That is, a relationship already exists between total surplus value produced and total capital employed, prior to distribution, which gives the average. In that case, Fred Moseley's story about "levels of abstraction" must be wrong. It is not true, in that case, that the average producer's profit rate appears only "in competition", whatever that means, because that average is already given by the relationship between a prior mass of surplus-value and the total production capital employed. I think myself that when Marx assumes theoretically that a given quantity of newly produced surplus value is available for distribution, this is just a simplifying assumption. If you know anything about the complexity of the relationship between values and prices in the real world, then you know that the real relationship between values and prices is only approximate and often "messy". In the abstract model, all these complexities are disregarded, and an order of procedure is adopted. It is true, that Marx's theory does require a systematic relationship between product-values and product-prices, but the relationship need not be an exact one, and in fact (if you know anything about econometrics) it cannot be an exact one. I differ with regard to Fred Moseley's original refinement about "levels of abstraction" (whatever it means) since for Marx', "total capital" and "many capitals" co-exist and interact all the time, and they do not exist at a different "level of abstraction". That is the whole point of a dialectical analysis: the whole and the parts co-exist and mutually influence each other, and they are understood within one unitary theoretical framework. It is merely that conventional economists distinguish between micro-economics and macro-economics, and postulate micro laws which do not exist at the macro level, and vice versa. In the transformation problem literature, there is also a lot of conceptual huffing and puffing about whether certain variables are given magnitudes, or whether they are inferred magnitudes. We should, of course, care to distinguish between "society's total capital" (total social capital), "society's production capital", and the concept of "capital in general". They do not all mean the same thing. In Marx's analysis, some magnitudes are held constant, in order to examine the effect of variation in other magnitudes. Yet Marx could have started and finished his reasoning in many different ways, and indeed Engels's sequence for the manuscripts of Capital Vol. 3 represents only one interpretation of the sequence. J.
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