----- 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
