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
