Jim Devine wrote:
> Jurriaan Bendien wrote:
> > It was Bortciewicz who introduces the idea that surplus value is
> > redistributed, and to analyse this redistribution quantitatively, requires
> > the identity of total value=total price.
>
> the identity is also in Marx, as is total surplus-value = total
> property income ("profit").
>
Yes, it is Marx's identity in his discussion of the transformation problem in
Vol. III of Capital. Nevertheless, it is only approximately true. Yet the
"New Solution" of the transformation problem takes this identify as
sacrosanct.
One of the things Bortkiewicz did is show that, in an economic model in which
things sold at their prices of production, that one wouldn't in general have
both that total prices equal total value, and total profits equal surplus
value. He, and those who followed him, assumed that any deviation in these
equalities -- however small -- defeats Marx's theory. This was an astonishing
rigid and the dogmatic interpretation of value, but the "New Solution"
follows in this wake, and boggs itself down in complexities and
contradictions in order to preserve that total profits exactly equals total
surplus value. (It does not, however, succeed in maintaining that the price
of production and the value of the total constant capital, measured in
financial terms, are the same. And yet this was another of Marx's identities.
Nor did it succeed in equating the profit rate and the profit rate measured
in value terms, and this too was another of Marx's identities.)
In fact, total profits equals the price of production of the goods bought
with the profits, while total surplus value is the value of these goods.
These goods don't equal the total sum of commodities, and therefore one
wouldn't generally expect that the organic composition of these goods was
equal to the average organic composition for the whole economy. Well, the
difference, for a complex economy, might actually be very small, but there
is no reason to assume exact equality. And so, there should be a certain
difference between the total profits and the total surplus value, measured in
financial terms.
And there is no need to have this exact equality. What Marx was seeking to do
was to show that value explained various capitalist phenomena, and that the
changes needed to deal with prices of production left these explanations in
tact (but explained a few additional features of capitalist exploitation).
This doesn't require an exact equality between total profits in financial
terms, and total value measured in financial terms. (In general, and in
Bortkiewicz's model, total profits and total surplus value agree when
measured either in physical or value terms.)
In fact, Marx's basic argumentation is strengthened by introducing the small
necessary correction into the "helper formulas" he used in the discussion of
the transformation problem. However, such a change in the "helper formulas"
is incompatible with various mechanical interpretations of value, and also
with various ideas that it would be a socialistic thing to do to carry out
exchange according to value (or, what amounts ot the same thing, planning
without direct exchange but done according to "shadow prices").
Indeed, some people do believe that calculation according to the labor-
content or value of products is a socialistic method of calculation. In their
2005 article "What's at stake in the debate on value", Paul Cockshott and
Allin Cottrell state that one of the things in stake is precisely such a use
of the labor content. They write:
"By relying on the results of information theory and computational complexity
theory one can also demonstrate that claims relating to the impossibility of
using labour values in a socialist economy are unjustified." (Section 5.
Conclusion)
They also claim that Marx supported this method of calculation. To prove
this, they refer to Marx's well-known discussion in "Critique of the Gotha
Program" of labor certificates or vouchers. (See Section 1. Introduction)
They ignore the facts that
* labor certificates were not intended to be used as a means of buying and
selling between factories;
* that they were intended only as a way of distributing goods among the
working population;
* that Marx referred to distribution on this basis as distribution according
to "bourgeois right";
* that Marx had held that reducing things to how they measured on a
quantitative scale meant ignoring their qualitative differences;
* and that Marx held that planning had to deal consciously with preserving
environmental properties, while the labor content would give a value of zero
to what used to be called the gifts of nature.
-- Joseph Green
[email protected]
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