>In response to Doug's (tongue-in-cheek?) comment > >>Never. It was a ruse devised by the bourgeoisie to occupy the >>attention of otherwise smart and knowledgeable Marxian economists on >>something addictively divisive but politically irrelevant. > >Charles writes > >>Charles: Isn't it worse than that ? Marx asserts as principle the >>insolubility of the transformation problem. The unsystematic relationship >>between value and prices is symptomatic of the basic anarchy of capitalist >>production. If the problem were "solved" , Marx would be refuted. > >Depends on what you think the "transformation problem" refers to. As I >read Marx, the "problem," as he posed it in Chapter 9 of Volume III, lies >in showing that aggregate prices equal aggregate values and aggregate >surplus value equals aggregate profits even if commodities exchange at >prices of production which are disproportional to their values (which is >the general case). Issues have been raised with the logic of Marx's >original demonstration, and interpretations of his value theory have been >offered that get around these issues at the cost of raising others. But >the real question, it seems to me, is whether anything at all that is >critical to Marxist political economy hinges on this demonstration. And I >agree with Doug's negative response to this question. > >Gil
Does the Sraffa model which presumably makes Marx's demonstration redundant explain the source of profit any better the Quesnay model to which as Heilbroner notes it bears a family resemblance explains the origin of the produit net? rb
