Carrol, just a brief comment: Marx himself never argued that commodity values have to be "converted" into prices. This would be meaningless nonsense, since a commodity always has both a price and a value at the same time, and the critical factor in competition is precisely - as Marx indicated at the very beginning of Capital Vol. 3 - whether in fact the commodity can sell below its value or above its value, and realise a good profit at the same time.
The "transformation of commodity values into prices of production" just means, that the regulation of the exchange of commodities directly according to product-values (quantities of labour-time) changes into the regulation of the exchange of commodities according to their prices of production. This theoretical transformation mirrors the historical transition from simple commodity production - where the producer compares how much he can get in return for his own product and his own labour time - to capitalist production, where what counts is comparative capital yields, i.e. the price at which products would have to sell, in order to obtain a normal profit rate on the capital invested in their production - assuming given cost prices for output, ruling market prices and ruling profit margins (for some useful historical insights, see Robert Lopez, "The trade of medieval Europe", Cambridge Economic History of Europe Vol. 2, 1952, pp. 334f.). The 20th century history of Marxist economics offers us a sad spectacle. First, Marxists volunteered for an intellectual lobotomy by epistemologist Werner Sombart, apologist Nikolai Bukharin and accountant Ladislaus von Bortciewicz. Then, after a long and largely pointless mathematical detour, they all just dump their Marxism, arguing in the end with Howard & King that "it never made any sense anyway, as a theory of price". That is just to say, that they never understood why you need that theory anyway, in other words, what the question or problem is to which the theory is an answer. Some stay in a half-way house, where the theory of value is completely independent from the theory of price, with no understanding of the relationship between value-form and price-form. Marxist economists seem to have been mainly people with an answer in search of a question... a quasi-religious sort of thing, bearing witness to a faith and finding testimony for the faith. In Marx's own critique of the political economists, actually numerous "transformations" are mentioned. This can be verified easily, simply by reading the chapter titles in Das Kapital. These are "transformations" in the social and economic form which a human practice takes, which are reflected in the categorizations of the political economists. Marx explicitly mentions 12 such transformations (Verwandlungen) in the chapter titles of Das Kapital: Capital Vol. 1: - the transformation of money into capital - the transformation of the value and price of labour-power into wages - the transformation of surplus value into capital (we could in principle add the transformations [Uebergangen] in the general form of value) Capital Vol. 2: - the transformation of the circuits of capital Capital Vol. 3: - the transformation of surplus value into profit - the transformation of the rate of surlus value into the rate of profit - the tranformation of profit into average profit - the tranformation of commodity values into prices of production - the tranformation of commodity and money capital into commercial capital and money-dealing capital - the tranformation of money into loan capital - the transformation of capital or revenue into money that is transformed into loan capital - the transformation of surplus profit into ground rent These are twelve "transformation problems", not just one. If we wanted to bring Marx's theory up to date, we would obviously have to include quite a few more "transformations" since the credit system creates many more derivative forms for loan capital and joint-stock capital. Marx's explicit aim in describing these transformations is, to explain why economic phenomena appear in human consciousness (including the consciousness of the political economists) quite differently from the way they really are. This becomes apparent, only when we investigate the origin of those phenomena, i.e. when we understand how they historically emerge in the first instance. That already tells you that Marx's theory is not simply an "objective theory of value" (as Sombart, Bukharin and the Marxists after them claimed) since Marx very explicitly aimed to explain the connection between the objective and the subjective, between the way things subjectively appear and how they objectively are. The dispute is not about a Bhaskarian "hidden essence" which can never be observed, and claimed to be reasonable although it can never be proved, but about the meaning of observables which cannot be grasped unless we fully understand the historical emergence of those observables (out of which their future trajectory follows). As a corollary, "subjective theories of value" are not completely wrong either, since they can validly grasp aspects of how economic actors actually have to deal with the market valuation of products, services and assets. It is just that mistaking these aspects for the whole story leads to vulgar economics. This general point was explicitly acknowledged by the anthropologist Lawrence Krader, who in other respects defended a fairly orthodox interpretation of Marx's theory of commodity values. Jurriaan _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
