Value from Nowhere: a response to Dumenil and Levy (first submission)

Freeman, Alan (1999): Value from Nowhere: a response to Dumenil and Levy (first submission).

Abstract

This article was submitted in 1999 to the Review of Radical Political Economy but was rejected. It responds to Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy’s (1999) “The conservation of value: a rejoinder to Alan Freeman”. This was a critique of the Temporal Single-System (TSS) interpretation of Marx’s value theory presented in my (1996) Marx and non-Equilibrium Economics.

In this response, I show that the paradoxes which Duménil and Lévy found in the TSS approach arose from a dogmatic adherence to the simultaneist paradigm which imposes, a priori and without reference to real phenomena, a distinct ontology from which change is absent. I show that when the supposition of a static economy is dropped, simultaneism creates value out of nowhere, and cannot thus support the elementary economic distinction between production and circulation. A uniform treatment of fixed capital, and the formation of social values, eliminates the alleged paradoxes. I show their own approach to be incoherent, generating negative values from its own assumptions. This is the first of two responses to this article which were rejected by the RRPE board. I have placed the second response in the public domain at the same time as this response.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: TSSI, Marx, Value
• Subjects: B - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches > B1 - History of Economic Thought through 1925 > B14 - Socialist ; Marxist; B - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches > B1 - History of Economic Thought through 1925 > B16 - Quantitative and Mathematical; B - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches > B5 - Current Heterodox Approaches > B51 - Socialist ; Marxian ; Sraffian

References

Papers of the International Working Group on Value Theory (IWGVT) are available on www.greenwich.ac.uk/~fa03/iwgvt

Bortkiewicz, L. von (1952), ‘Value and Price in the Marxian System’(part I), in International Economic Papers, 1952(2), 5-60.

Duménil , Gérard and Lévy, Dominique (1997), “The conservation of value: a rejoinder to Alan Freeman”, IWGVT working paper.

Duménil , Gérard and Lévy, Dominique (1988), “Linear Joint Production Models: Prelude to a Reassessment of the Classical Legacy”. Political Economy: studies in the Surplus Approach Vol 4, number 2

Ernst, John R. (1982), ‘Simultaneous Valuation Extirpated: A Contribution to the Critique of the Neo-Ricardian Concept of Value’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 14(2) pp85-94.

Farjoun, E and Machover, M (1984) ‘The Production of Commodities by Means of What?’ in Mandel and Freeman (1984)

Freeman, Alan (1996) ‘Price, value and profit – a continuous, general, formulation’ in Freeman and Carchedi (1996)

_________ (1997) ‘The Poverty of Nations: Relative Surplus Value, Technical Change and Accumulation in the modern global market’ in LINKS June 1997.

_________ (1998) ‘What happens in recessions? A value-theoretic approach to Liquidity Preference’. paper to 1998 EEA conference

_________ (1999) ‘The Limits of Ricardian Value’; paper to 1999 IWGVT conference

Freeman,A. and Carchedi, G. (1996) (eds) Marx and Non-Equilibrium Economics, Cheltenham: Elgar.

Kliman, Andrew (1988), ‘The Profit Rate Under Continuous Technologi¬cal Change’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 20:2 & 3.

_________ (1996) ‘Marx vs. the “20th-century Marxists”: a Reply to Laibman’, 1996 IWGVT paper .

_________ (1998) ‘The significance of the inconsistency allegations’, 1998 IWGVT conference paper.

Kliman, A. and McGlone, T. (1988), ‘The Transformation non Problem and the non Transformation Problem’, Capital and Class, 35, Summer, pp56 83.

Kristjansen, Dave (1998) ‘Effective Demand and the Market Price of Production’, 1998 IWGVT conference paper

Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press

Lee, Chai-On (0000)

Maldonado-Filho, E (1997). Paper to 1997 IWGVT conference

Maldonado-Filho, E (1998). Paper to 1998 IWGVT conference

Mandel, E. and Freeman, A. (1984) Ricardo, Marx and Sraffa. London: Verso

Marx, K (1979) Capital Volume 1. Harmandsworth:Penguin

Moseley, Fred (1993), ‘Marx’s Logical Method and the “Transformation Problem”’, in Moseley (ed.) (1993), Marx’s Method in Capital: a reexamination. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities.

Naples, M (1996) ‘Time, money, equilibrium: methodology and the labour theory of the profit rate’ in Freeman and Carchedi (1996)

Pasinetti, L. (1977)(ed) Essays in the Theory of Joint Production. London:McMillan

Ramos, Alejandro and Rodriguez, Adolfo (1996) ‘The transformation of values into prices of production: a different reading of Marx’s text’ in Freeman and Carchedi (1996)

Rodriguez, Adolfo(1996) ‘Money, the postulates of invariance and the transformation of Marx into Ricardo’, in Freeman and Carchedi (1996)

Savran, S (1984) ‘The Negation of “Negative Values”’ in Mandel and Freeman (1984)

Schefold, J. (0000) Mr Sraffa and Joint Production, Cheltenham: Elgar.

Schefold, J. (1977) “Fixed Capital, Accumulation and Technical Progress” in Pasinetti(1977)

Walras, L. (1984) Éléments d’Économie politique pure, Translated by Jaffé as Elements of Pure Economics or the Theory of Social Wealth, London: George Allen and Unwin and Philadelphia: Orion Editions.

Wolff, R., Roberts, B. and Callari, A. (l982), ‘Marx’s (not Ricardo’s) “Transformation Problem”: A Radical Reconceptualization’, History of Political Economy, Vol 14 No. 4., pp 564-582.