I wrote:
> > 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).
Mark Jones writes:
>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.
The word "assumption" summarizes the notion that in vol. I (after chapter
3), Marx was dealing with the capitalist mode of production _as a whole_
(capitalism in general), dealing with a very attenuated notion of commodity
exchange and competition amongst capitalists and abstracting altogether
from the heterogeneity within the capitalist class. The only exchange dealt
with in any depth after chapter 3 is that of money-capital for labor-power
(and other inputs to production), so that the entire emphasis is on M-C-M'
(where M' > M, partly because Marx assumes away realization problems in
vol. I to focus only on the production of surplus-value. He later turns to
the issue of accumulation, presenting a simple growth model.) At this high
level of abstraction, the price of production of any commodity equal its
value (while the market price of the commodity equals its price of
production), if we measure prices and values using the same metric. I could
also find the footnote where Marx admits that he's making an assumption,
but all my copies of volume I are at work. (The no-realization-crisis
assumption is in the preface to the section on accumulation.)
>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.
You're right (if I understand you correctly). I also wanted to mention that
the exploitation of labor that Marx analyzes in vol. I still exists when he
drops the "assumption" that values = prices in vol. III.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~JDevine
