Walt Byers wrote: > Also, could anyone tell me of the secondary works > discussing Marx's views > on price-value divergence that they know of.
I tend to agree with Michael Heinrich <http://www.oekonomiekritik.de> that "value" and "price" are simply categories existing at different levels of abstraction in Marx's account. For an account of how the "monetary theory of value" differs from traditional Marxist accounts, there are good introductory texts in English at <mrzine.monthlyreview.org/heinrich031106.html> and <http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=06/07/28/1916205&mode=nested&tid=9> Also, if you can read German, the same author's book Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Eine Einführung is an essential reference. Here is a quick-and-dirty translation of his comments on the "transformation problem": "Within the framework of a monetary theory of value, the issue cannot be some sort of procedure for converting values into production prices. Rather, the 'transformation of values into production prices' constitutes a terminological further development of the determinate form of value. "One can only speak of an exchange at value as long as the determining instance of exchange is the proportion of individually expended labour to the societal whole of labour expenditure.[...] "[...] Value, magnitude of value, money, etc. are categorical preconditions for depicting the production and circulation process of Capital. But Capital as it is dealt with in this analysis, is not yet Capital as it exists in empirical reality. Only after Capital is depicted as a unity of production and circulation process, are we at the point where we can deal with the fundamental properties of an empirically-existing individual Capital." As Heinrich points out earlier in the same book, traditional Marxists accounts (he mentions Wolfgang Fritz Haug and Ernest Mandel) have too often dealt with the first few chapters of Volume 1 as an account of a historically-existing simple commodity production. In fact, what Marx is doing in his account is starting at a very high level of abstraction and progressing towards an account that approximates a "pure" capitalism as it would exist in empirical reality. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta. http://new.mail.yahoo.com
