Jurriaan, This is response to Carrol's typical-anti-Marxist nonsense-pretending-to-be-Marxist is spot on.
I would suggest that here - " 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..." - you substitute "some Marxist economics in the 20th Century" . I mean Lenin and a lot of other important Marxist economists of the 20th Century did nothing of the kind. Charles From: "Jurriaan Bendien" 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.). -clip- _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
