Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: RE: More on A16 fire hazard
"At 07:13 PM 04/16/2000 +0100, you wrote: - Original Message - From: "Jim Devine" [*] In CAPITAL, Marx goes a long distance with the contrast between "what's good according to capitalist standards" (trading at value, equal exchange) and how the system works in practice (exploitation in production). Surely Marx's entire point in Capital is to show that "how the system works in practice" is precisely by _trading at value_. what I was saying was that in volume I of CAPITAL, Marx shows "how the system works" precisely _when_ trading at value -- but that nonetheless there is exploitation of labor by capital. (It's a little like John Roemer's business of showing the existence of "exploitation" in a perfectly competitive system. But Marx's theory is much more profound.) In volume III, as he turns to the issue of how competition works and how the participants perceive the system and act on those perceptions, he drops the assumption that commodities trade at value (so that there is unequal exchange, the "transformation problem," and all that). So capitalism does not trade at value in practice (in Marx's view, at least). Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~JDevine
Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: RE: More on A16 fire hazard
- Original Message - From: "Jim Devine" In volume III, as he turns to the issue of how competition works and how the participants perceive the system and act on those perceptions, he drops the assumption that commodities trade at value (so that there is unequal exchange, the "transformation problem," and all that). So capitalism does not trade at value in practice (in Marx's view, at least). This seems misleading. In Cap III Marx does not 'drop the assumption that commodities trade at value'. It is NOT an assumption in the first place, if by this you mean a hypothetical speculation used to investigate a matter. What Marx tries to do in Cap III, and succeeds, is to show how real phenomena such as unequal exchange and value-price transformation can coexist with and even be entailed by, the fundamental fact of equal commodity exchange, including of course the exchange of labour with capital. Mark Jones http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList
