TSSI or NI?

There are multiple different responses to the transformation problem. While some give up and reject the LTV all together because of it, there are some Marxists that have come up with responses to it. The most common responses are the Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI) and the New Interpretation (NI). There are many other interpretations of Marx and responses to the transformation problem, but those are the most common.

So, TSSI or NI? What are some good books on the subject (Aside from Reclaiming Marx's Capital.)?

Other urls found in this thread:

users.wfu.edu/cottrell/vol3.pdf
youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3F695D99C91FC6F7
marxists.org/archive/rubin/value/index.htm
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

I've seen one response to the transformation problem that claims the reason prices and labour values don't match up isn't due to theoretical inconsistencies, but due to the fact that the SNLT to sustain the capitalist class is more than the SNLT to sustain the proletariat.

May be wrong.

Marxhead, can you explain what "value" is to me?

There's also the probabilistic interpretation (though it's arguably a revision rather than an interpretation since it denies the tendency of the rate of profit to equalise) advanced by Emmanuel Farjoun and Moshe Machover, and later by Paul Cockshott.

users.wfu.edu/cottrell/vol3.pdf

NI is shit but it's the best you got if you aren't gonna do the right thing and drop LTV.

Possibly. I'm not all that familiar with the Transformation Problem debate. I only know a small amount a bit about the LTV and the transformation problem.

To put it as simply as possible, value is an objects social status during exchange. The value of a commodity is purely social. To quote Marx,

To translate, value is not an intrinsic, physical thing. Value is a Durkheimian social fact. In exchange relation, we are treating qualitatively different objects as quantitatively equal by treating them as representations of abstract labor, which is the social substance of value.

Hope that helps a bit. Kapitalism101 has a pretty good series explaining the LTV, though it's unfinished and probably won't be finished.

youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3F695D99C91FC6F7

I've listened to Kapitalisms videos and read the articles. It just left me confused.

When does Marx get into how objects that do not have value, can be exchanged as value. By the way, I'm asking all these questions based on Marx's theoretical assumptions in Capital, not empirical observation. I've only read Capital 1 and he only mentions that very briefly, the rest of the book is examining the process of production. Could you sum up what Marx says for me? I can accept value in commodities being a social status based on the allocation of human labour in society

I just finished Capital 1 a few days ago, and I realized my reading of it was far too rigid.

It took me awhile to think of a way to respond to this, then I remembered I.I. Rubin's book Essays on Marx's Theory of Value. Chapter 5 seems to answer your question pretty well.

"At first glance all the basic concepts of Political Economy (value, money, capital, profit, rent, wages, etc.) have a material character. Marx showed that under each of them is hidden a definite social production relation which in the commodity economy is realized only through things and gives things a determined, objectively-social character, a "determination of form" (more precisely: a social form), as Marx often put it. Analyzing any economic category, we must first of all point to the social production relation expressed by it. Only if the material category is an expression of a precisely given, determined production relation, does it enter the framework of our analysis. If this material category is not related to a given production relation among people, we pull it out of the framework of our analysis and set it aside. We classify economic phenomena into groups and build concepts on the basis of the identity of the production relations which the phenomena express, and not on the basis of the coincidence of their material expressions. For example, the theory of value deals with exchange between autonomous commodity producers, with their interaction in the labor process through the products of their labor. The fluctuation of the value of products on the market interests economists not for itself, but as it is related to the distribution of labor in society, to the production relations among independent commodity producers. For example, if land (which is not the product of exchange) appears in exchange, then production relations in this case do not connect commodity producers with commodity producers, but with a landowner; if the price fluctuations of plots of land have a different influence on the course and distribution of the production process from the price fluctuations of the products of labor, then we are dealing with a different social relation, a different production relation, behind the same material form of exchange and value. This social relation is subject to special analysis, namely in the context of the theory of rent. Thus land, which has price, i.e., a money expression of value (as a material category), does not have "value" in the sense mentioned above, i.e., in the act of exchange the price of land does not express the functional social relation which relates the value of the products of labor with the working activity of independent commodity producers. This led Marx to the following formulation, which has often been misinterpreted: "Objects that in themselves are not commodities, such as conscience, honor, &c., are capable of being offered for sale by their holders, and of thus acquiring, through their price, the form of commodities. Hence an object may have a price without having value. The price in that case is imaginary, like certain quantities in mathematics. On the other hand, the imaginary price-form may sometimes conceal either a direct or an indirect real value relation; for instance, the price of uncultivated land, which is without value, because no human labor has been incorporated in it" (C., I, p. 102). These words of Marx, which have often puzzled and even provoked the mockery of critics, express a profound idea about the possible divergence between the social form of working relations and the material form which corresponds to it. The material form has its own logic and can include other phenomena in addition to the production relations which it expresses in a given economic formation. For example, in addition to the exchange of products of labor among independent commodity producers (the basic fact of the commodity economy), the material form of exchange includes the exchange of plots of land, the exchange of goods which cannot be multiplied by labor, exchange in a socialist society, etc. From the standpoint of the material forms of economic phenomena, the sale of cotton and the sale of a painting by Raphael or a plot of land do not in any way differ from each other. But from the standpoint of their social nature, their connection with production relations, and their impact on the working activity of society, the two phenomena are of a different order and have to be analyzed separately."

marxists.org/archive/rubin/value/index.htm

Thank you. If I'm understand Rubin correctly, he's claiming that the role of land in reproducing society is qualitatively different from the role of a commodity, and also materially determined differently. In this means that we should express "land" to have the same relationship to a commodity as a commodity to commodity, but that this relationship should be investigated and then compared and related to the relationship between a commodity and a commodity.

So this leads to the breakdown between "price" and exchange value. And while I haven't read Marx's volume 3 I've gotten the impression from reading the blogger Jehu that Marx thought prices could very much be subjectively determined but the exchanges, so long as they represented an exchange involving the products of labour, allocated an objective amount of societies capacity for labour and the concrete realization of that capacity. Even if "value" is unquantifiable, societies total capacity for labour is an objective and material phenomenon.

One thing I'm still not clear on is if the "exchange value" of a commodity is merely a theoretical concept and supposed to explain why industries obtain an average productivity, or if commodity exchange based on exchange value was something Marx considered to be theoretically possible rather than a concept he used to further elaborate on. I'm guessing he meant the former?

I'm reading David Harvey's "Limits of Capital" as well and I'll read the Rubin piece tomorrow. One of his pieces on "abstract labour" confused me and I thought he was misinterpreting Marx. Not that it's his fault, the Soviets did not have access to most of Marx's writing.

Despite theoretical "iffiness" that I find reoccurring whenever I consider Marxian economics, Marx's model seems to have the best predictive power for the evolution of a Capitalist society. The fact that Marx predicted the collapse of commodity money 100 years in advance as well as the introduction of more state managed industry speaks volumes about his praxis. The "iffiness" of his value theory I think, is insolvable. But the fact that there is so many definitions of value within economics, ranging from Marginal theory to Physicalism proves that assumptions matter less than predictive power and in that sense Keynesian and Neoclassical economics have failed spectacularly, thought I haven't looked into Post-Keyenesisn or Austrian economics to get a good grip on other Heterodox schools.

I'm willing to bet you haven't read Capital.

It's odd. Rebel seems to not really have a grasp on concepts that he understood fairly well in his videos. From this we can conclude that he is either a sophist or forgetful.