At 17:58 29/11/2006, Angelus Novus wrote:
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>
I agree as well. In 'The Theoretical Status of Monopoly Capital'
published in 1985 in Wolff & Resnick, Rethinking Marxism (essays for
Sweezy and Magdoff), I wrote:
That was, in part, the project of Volume III of Capital--- to
demonstrate why essence, the inner nature of capital, necessarily
appeared as it did.
Thus, we see here in Volume III the consideration of the rate of
profit (which has the rate of surplus-value as its 'invisible and
unknown essence') and prices of production ('an utterly external and
prima facie meaningless form of the value of commodities, a form as
it appears in competition').[1]
[1] Ibid.: 43, 194.
This essay is waiting patiently to be reprinted by Brill in
a collection, Following Marx: the method of political economy, which
includes a new essay, 'Marx's Methodological Project' (basically, an
unpublished piece which goes back to 1980) where I propose:
Surplus value, in short, is invisible. It is essence.
It is a category discovered with the scientist's instrument, the
power of abstraction. Profit, in contrast, is 'the form of
appearance of surplus-value, and the latter can be sifted out from
the former only by analysis' (Marx, 1981b: 139). Only by the
process of proceeding from the concrete to the abstract can we
develop an understanding of surplus value (and thus its surface
form). Profit, Marx noted, is 'a transformed form of surplus value,
a form in which its origin and the secret of its existence are
veiled and obliterated.'
...
We move, in short, from the surface phenomenon (profit)
by analysis; and, through the process of reasoning, we develop the
concept invisible on the surface (surplus value) which allows us to
understand the concrete. That same distinction between inner and
outer applies to value and price. We observe prices on the surface
but their nature is entirely mystified. By developing the concept
of value, an inner category, we can grasp the link to labour and
from the concept of abstract labour to the nature of money. Indeed,
without value, how could possibly we understand the nature of money
and thus capital (Marx, 1981b: 295)?
...
However, here where we are considering Marx's methodological
project, an immediate question presents itself: if value, surplus
value and the rate of surplus value do not exist on the surface
whereas price, profit and the rate of profit are their respective
forms and only exist on that plane, in what sense is it possible to
talk about the 'transformation' of value into price?
If value, surplus value and the rate of surplus value
are 'invisible essences', then the much-discussed question of
'transformation' must be understood not to be a real process but,
rather, a logical process between two levels of abstract thought.
We can see that price and profit are the premise, i.e., are
categories of the real society which are the point of departure.
When it comes, however, to attempting to understand, the categories
of value and surplus value precede price and profit but do not
themselves exist alongside their forms.
And now back to the real world.
cheers,
michael
Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Currently based in Venezuela.
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