Jim, > It's only on the macroeconomic level that the objective centers of > gravity of prices are the values.
Clearly, that was the context. >> Clearly, these values are the social aggregate (average) of private >> expectations about the amounts of social labor required to reproduce >> the MP and LP in "normal" conditions -- expectations conditional on >> existing information available to whoever is doing the valuation. > > I disagree or maybe I misunderstand. In any event, values don't > reflect subjective expectations. Instead, they reflect objective facts > (which are often unknown or poorly known). The value of labor-power, > for example, is the cost of reproducing labor-power over time, stated > in labor-value terms. Workers' subjectivity -- their class > consciousness or lack thereof -- can raise or lower that cost, but it > has to be expressed in practice, not simply in thoughts or words. I mean value in the Marxist sense. In Marxese, the value of a given commodity is the social labor time *required* or *necessary* to reproduce it under normal or average (i.e. expected!) conditions. Not necessarily the actual social labor it took to produce it. The normal (or average or expected) conditions of production are changing continuously. Ongoing changes in the productive force of labor cause continuous "value revolutions" (Marx). The value of existing or in-process commodities is continuously altered as the expected conditions of production shift. Before actually undertaking production, how can the amount of *social* labor that it'll take to reproduce a given commodity be determined *with certainty*? It can't. So, there's uncertainty. Even about the amount of your own *private* labor required. You may only know with certainty what it took in the past, but that's just information to determine values. The content of value can only be forward-looking. Otherwise it's meaningless. If the amount of social labor required to reproduce a commodity is uncertain, then it's an expectation. As simple as that. Value is the (social or market) average or *expectation* of a bunch of private expectations. An average of averages is an average. By the way, in statistics, aggregate, average, and expectation are essentially interchangeable terms. Finally, my previous post has a long paragraph, which I wrote to preempt the idea that social expectations are necessarily subjective. The whole point of that paragraph is that social expectations are a hardened social object. (Above, I obviously ignore the layer of complexity added by the deviations -- systematic or not -- between relative values and market prices.)
