Dostaller

Gilles Dostaler

Marx's Theory of Value and the Transformation Problem: Some Lessons from a Debate*
In our description of how production relations are converted into entities and rendered independent in relation to the agents of production, we leave aside the manner in which the interrelations, due to the worldmarket, its conjunctures, movements of market-prices, periods of credit, industrialand commercial cycles, alternations of prosperity and crisis, appear to them as overwhelming natural laws that irresistibly enforce their will over them, and confront them as blind necessity. We leave this aside because the actual movement of competition belongs beyond our scope, and we need present only the inner organisation of the capitalist mode of production, in its ideal average, as it were.Karl Marx, Capital!

Capitalist societies are more than ever characterized by this "conversion into entities." To the fetishism of commodities, money and capital is now added that of technology, science and information. Labour-power has become "human capital." Science is henceforth considered a new "factor of production." The latest discoveries of what is called "economic science" help toobscure even more the nature of social relations in capitalist society, and thus to further remove us from an explanation of the phenomena which manifest themelves in this society. The fatal domination and blind necessity of "economic laws" have imposed themselves more and more, over the last ten years, through the *Translated by Sinclair Robinson, Department of French, Carleton University.
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mechanisms evoked by Marx. In their name, the ruling classes call on the people to tighten their belts and increasingly repress them. This domination and this necessity are expressed, precisely, by those "phenomenal forms which are starting points for the vulgar economist. "2 Prices rise. Currencies fluctuate in relation to one another. The stock exchange, and interestrates, are erratic. It is a fantastic ballet, dazzling for the uninitiated. Concretely, this is seen in a deterioration of the living and working conditions of the people, and by the growing gulf between the wealth of the so-called developed and undeveloped worlds. In the thirties, the economic crisis led to a qualitative leap in political economy as Keynes brought to light certain mechanismswhich had been obscured by the neo-classical tradition, which was then solidly established.? The Keynesian theory is giving way today to that of the "new economists," for whom a return to free markets is the way out of the economic crisis. The destruction of the logical coherence of the marginalist theory brought about by Sraffa in 1960 did not really shatter the neo-classical certitudes." Sraffa isignored by the economists who today advise governments and formalize, without explaining it, the ballet of figures. Or perhaps the "Sraffa revolution" accounts for the present decadence of the dominant theory. Instead of providing answers, they mask the foundations of their analysis. They refuse to ask themselves questions about it. Corresponding to this decadence there has been, over the lasttwenty years, a resurgence of the thought of Marx, in whom many discover a problematic more relevant to an analysis of present-day reality. The economic crisis, from this point of view, challenged Marxism. It is in this context that we must understand the latest stage in the debate on the theory of value and the transformation problem. Beyond the classical problem of the conversion from values toprices of production, what is in question is the transition from the analysis of "the inner organization of the capitalist mode of production, in its ideal average as it were" to the exposition of the "actual movement of competition." The question is whether, starting from the theory of value, correctly interpreted, we can explain what is happening today; whether, to synthesize, we can explain the...