"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
