Andrew, here. I've been away from the net for a month + and am now beginning to wade through things. I wanted to respond to Mike Meeropol's discussion of the transitivity of value, etc. If A, B, and C are commodities, and IW is the relation "is worth", as economists use the notion of worth or value, as Mike notes, we have A IW B <==> B IW A which implies A IW A A IW B, AND B IW C <==> A IW C which implies C IW A, which implies again A IW A. Mike asks _what else_ we can say, if anything, about value? I think we can't assume the correctness of the above. If someone asks you what the value of a lb. of coffee is and you say "a lb. of coffee" s/he will not be satisfied. The problem is not that it is tautological; rather, it is wrong. The value of a thing is SOMETHING ELSE. But the above relations never arrive at a "something else," moving around in a circle. This, in essence, is the argument that grounded Marx's search for a "third thing" which commodities have in common, a noncommodity element they all have in common. Indeed the very argument I've made, in slightly different form but with the "lb. of coffee" example, is contained in TSV Part III, in Marx's discussion of Bailey and the "verbal observer," part of the section on the disintegration of the Ricardian school. I don't have the book with me here, but the above should be sufficient to locate the passage. The opening pages of Capital rely very heavily on the Bailey-critique. I hope to digest all I've misses in the next couple of days or so, and perhaps offer some thoughts. I've heard it has been interesting. Andrew Kliman
