Might be worthwhile pointing out that Marx was trying to understand the nature of capital in a way that is of no interest to modern economics. Capital functions as a kind of immanent critique within the political economists before Marx, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. He set himself a specific task and I think this is important to note if one gets the sense that Marx was just fine tuning economic theories.
http://crisiscritique.org/political11/Andrew%20Kliman.pdfThe Specificity of Capital
It is frequently asserted that Capital “leaves out” or “overlooks” some important aspect of capitalism, or that its treatment of that aspect is “underdeveloped.” For example, Monthly Review author Heather Brown (2014) recently complained that “Marx’s theory remains underdeveloped in terms of providing an account that includes gender as important to understanding capitalism.” This presumes that “understanding capitalism” —as such or, perhaps, in its totality—was the aim of Capital. Since gender relations are important aspects of capitalism, it then follows that provision of a fuller account of gender relations would help to rescue Capital from the “underdeveloped” state in which its author left it.
I think this seriously misconstrues what Capital is about. It is entitled Capital for a reason. It is not entitled Everything You Need to Know about What Takes Place within Capitalism, or even Everything You Need to Know about Capitalism. It focuses specifically on capital––the process in and through which value “self-expands,” or becomes a bigger amount of value. It is about how that self-expansion is produced, how it is reproduced (renewed and repeated), and how the whole process is reflected, imperfectly, in the conventional thinking and concepts of economists and business people.
This does not mean that Capital is reductive. There is a crucial difference between having a specific focus and being reductive. I don’t think Marx wrote or suggested anywhere that the process of value’s self-expansion is the only thing within capitalism that matters or that other processes can be reduced to it. It does affect a lot of other things, sometimes in crucial ways––and this is perhaps the main reason that a book on Capital is mistaken for an Everything About Capitalism book––but to recognize the interrelationships is not to reduce these other things to the self-expansion of value.
Of course, there is some sense in which any book with a specific focus “leaves out” or “overlooks” other things, but we don’t normally complain that a cookbook leaves out or overlooks instructions for changing the oil in your car or any analysis of international politics. The charge that Capital “fails” to discuss many aspects of capitalism and what takes place within it seems to me to be similarly inappropriate and unfair.
And I suspect that in focusing on capital, Marx wasn't concerned with prices in itself and I think this does a nice job summarizing the divergence between what has developed out of the marginal revolution and the focus of political economists.
Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology - Simon ClarkeTechnically the marginalist revolution is defined by a new method of economic analysis which applies the calculus to the problem of the determination of prices. The new method of analysis did not involve any substantial technical innovations, for once the question of the determination of prices in the market had been posed as a topic for rigorous investigation the techniques required for solving the question fell almost immediately to hand. The pioneers all posed the question within the framework of a theory of utility and this in many ways made their approaches to the question, and their solutions, extremely cumbersome. However the essence of the problem, and of its solution, was relatively straightforward. Thus the methods of calculus had been applied to economic problems before, by such thinkers as Gossen and Cournot, and to analogous problems by Bernoulli, but the earlier attempts had been ignored, not because of a blindness to genius, but because the questions that were posed did not at the time seem particularly significant.
The new methods of analysis arose out of a new concern with the problem of prices. Economists had always sought to explain the determination of prices as part of their enterprise. What the marginalists introduced was an emphasis on the need for a rigorous theory of price determination. For classical political economy the determination of prices was a subordinate concern. The central theoretical issues were those of the constitutional order within which capitalism could best develop to the advantage of the nation as a whole, and of the relations between the classes proper to such a development. This led classical political economy to pose questions of distribution within the framework of a theory of growth, within which the rigorous determination of individual prices was of little concern, so long as the determination of prices could be assumed not to conflict too seriously with the theory of distribution. For the marginalists this order of priorities was inverted, and the central concern became one of developing a rigorous theory of price determination.
Within classical political economy the determination of prices was subordinate to the problem of distribution and prices were the by-product of the theory of distribution. Once wages, rent and the rate of profit had been determined, prices could be derived by adding together the component parts. However the contradiction between the classical theory of production and the Ricardian theory of distribution meant that the resultant prices did not coincide with the values according to which the distributive categories were determined. Hence within the Ricardian system the determination of prices was always subject to the qualifications that this divergence necessarily introduced. The vulgar critics of classical political economy had exploited this contradiction to reject the classical theory of distribution and the theory of value on which it was based. However, although they asserted the priority of price over value or even the exclusive reality of price as against value, they could offer no rigorous theory of price determination, nor did they seriously seek to develop such a theory.
The marginalists followed the vulgar economists in their concern with the question of prices, but they did not follow them in rejecting the need for a theory of value. For the marginalists a theory of value was essential to any attempt to develop a rigorous theory of price, and the scientific weakness of the classical theory of value was that it could not achieve this. The task the marginalists set themselves was to develop a rigorous theory of price determination on the basis of the subjective theory of value, the basis of the marginalist theory of value was initially defined as ‘utility’.
As I understand it, the matter of value has not been resolved, for good posts on this site, one should google ' sans salvador site:politicsforum.org'.
Sans Salvador seems to discuss things in more detail than many have previously.
And as a point to the AA's lack of knowledge...a quote from SS
No, opponents of the LTV should (and must, if they want to be correct) argue against the arguments for the LTV. There is as I said above no reason to believe the LTV must be false, but also no decisive evidence that it is correct.
This appears to be the problem that comes up, people interpreting Marx based on their own assumptions and world view, thus incapable of interpreting Marx's work because they don't know how Marx thought. Which is an issue expressed in a basic form with how AA couldn't get past using his own definition of value as subjective value and simply refused to engage with the definition within the context of a labor theory of value. As it stands, LTV is at least logically coherent based on it's own premises and thus has a logical consistency to it, the difficulty though is
empirically proving it. As logical consistency doesn't necessarily translate to a it being true/correct.
Basically, a valid critique should be aspiring to be an immanent critique, because that which deals the most blow is exposing the actual limitations of something by finding it's limits through it. As opposed to evaluating some abstract model based on how well it fits in accordance to some other model with its assumptions, which one probably mistakes as reality itself.
http://amiquote.tumblr.com/post/426639828/physical-concepts-are-free-creations-of-thePhysical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however they may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way to open the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all of the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison. But he certainly believes that, as his knowledge increases, his picture of reality will become simpler and simpler and will explain a wider and wider range of his sensuous impressions. He may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind. He may call this ideal limit the objective truth.
As an extra, saw SS posted an
FAQ on LTV, though they stated that they were less sympathetic than the person who made it, expressing that they perhaps thought it stretched itself a bit.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
- By annatar1914
- By Pewty