In fact surely the entire burden of Marx's thesis in all 3 vols of Cap + TSV
and indeed in all his mature economics writing, is that profits MUST be
explained and CAN ONLY be explained on the basis of EQUAL commodity
exchange, not for eg according to Physiocratic notions about wheat harvests
or mercantilist mysticism or whatever. The passages Jim Devine cites below
exactly encapsulate this central idea. And this is a separate question
anyway from the equivalence (or not) of values and prices, no?
Mark Jones
http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Devine" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2000 6:06 AM
Subject: [PEN-L:18220] Re: Re: Marx on value
> I wrote:
> >>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 I was thinking of can be found at the end of chapter 5 of CAPITAL
Vol. I:
>
> >The conversion of money into capital has to be explained on the basis of
> the laws that regulate the exchange of commodities, in such a way that the
> starting-point is the exchange of equivalents.
>
> > [footnote: ] From the foregoing investigation, the reader will see that
> this statement only means that the formation of capital must be possible
> even though the price and value of a commodity be the same; for its
> formation cannot be attributed to any deviation of the one from the other.
> If prices actually differ from values, we must, first of all, reduce the
> former to the latter, in other words, treat the difference as accidental
in
> order that the phenomena may be observed in their purity, and our
> observations not interfered with by disturbing circumstances that have
> nothing to do with the process in question. [this abstraction is similar
to
> making an assumption, though not in the sense of deductive logic. -- JD]
We
> know, moreover, that this reduction is no mere scientific process. The
> continual oscillations in prices, their rising and falling, compensate
each
> other, and reduce themselves to an average price [the price of production
> -- JD], which is their hidden regulator. It forms the guiding star of the
> merchant or the manufacturer in every undertaking that requires time. He
> knows that when a long period of time is taken, commodities are sold
> neither over nor under, but at their average price. If therefore he
thought
> about the matter at all, he would formulate the problem of the formation
of
> capital as follows: How can we account for the origin of capital on the
> supposition that prices are regulated by the average price, i. e.,
> ultimately by the value of the commodities? I say "ultimately," because
> average prices do not directly coincide with the values of commodities, as
> Adam Smith, Ricardo, and others believe. <
>
> The connection between "average prices" [prices of production] and values
> is on the macro level, as seen in Marx's equation of total prices with
> total value.
>
> In the quote above, Marx does not explicitly assume that prices = value,
> but this assumption follows directly if we abstract from the homogeneity
> within the capitalist class, ignoring differences in the organic
> composition of capital -- as Marx does in vol. I. I remember that Marx
> makes the assumption explicit somewhere in vol. II, but I don't have the
> energy to look at this point.
>
> [Returning home to Chris Burford's message, again I had no copy of CAPITAL
> vol. I on hand. (Weirdly, all four of them [!] at work, whereas I have
> three copies of vol. II here!) However, I remembered that I had a CD-ROM
of
> the "Multimedia Capital." But I couldn't cut and paste a footnote from it
> -- so I had to find the above on the web. In the process, I found that
> someone put two folk-type songs on the CD-ROM. Neither has anything to do
> with CAPITAL! Perhaps the group that produced the CD-ROM includes a
> singer-songwriter.)
>
> Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~JDevine
>
>
