Julio, this is very interesting. I have one comment. You write that >As I remember, the “capital critique” ... implied a devastating critique of Marx’s own reproduction story. This was because, in Marx’s rendition in Capital, volume 2, production is broken down into departments by using use value as the criterion: means of production in one bucket, consumption goods in the other bucket. In other words, Marx assumed a (capitalist) department 1 that produced quantities of an implied homogeneous use value, namely “means of production.” <
I don't think Marx implied the existence of a homogeneous use-value called "means of production" or another one called "means of subsistence" (consumption goods) in his volume II reproduction schemes. Instead, those schemes were stated in terms of flows of value (which corresponded to flow of revenues under his assumption there that price = value). As part of his march from the abstract (at the start of volume I) to the concrete, he introduced the distinction between means of production and means of subsistence, something that he had abstracted from before. But, just like in volume I, he doesn't assume that use-values can be added up except using prices (which equal values in volume II). His reproduction schemes are not like the story Sraffa or Ian Steedman presents as much as they're like models in Keynesian macroeconomics: for the simple reproduction case with only two sectors, total value-added in the machine-producing sector (total value net of the value of the costs of machines and other material inputs used there) = the sum of the value of the costs of machines and other material inputs used in the other sector. Or in symbols V1 + S1 = C2. Dropping the value = price assumption, this equation can be stated instead in terms of nominal revenues instead or (if you insist) as real revenues by dividing by some measure of the aggregate average price level. This kind of reproduction equation is also not an equilibrium condition as much as a "harmony" condition, showing how the sectors relate to each other when everything is going well. Marx didn't think that accumulation would proceed with these conditions always be met. Instead, his vision of the capitalist economies involved continual disequilibrium sometimes broken by equilibration (crises). -- Jim On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 12:50 PM, Julio Huato <[email protected]> wrote: > I just posted this note on my blog: > > http://juliohuato.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/on-the-cambridge-capital-critique/ > -- Jim Devine / "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." -- Paul Dirac. Social science is in the middle.... and usually in a muddle. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
