Abstract
In his macro-monetary interpretation of Marx's theory of value, Fred Moseley claims that Marx's prices of production should be considered as the long-run equilibrium condition of capital reproduction under the assumption of given technology and given capital distribution. Moseley's methodological interpretation depends on the claim that the general rate of profit is completely predetermined in the first two volumes of Capital. I argue to the contrary that though Moseley shows the inadequacy of the Standard Interpretation, he fails to provide a convincing description of Marx's category of prices of production. The production of the new total value and total surplus-value cannot be considered as simply determined by the initial conditions of production; if we want to describe how prices of production are formed and the role they play in the social reproduction of capital, we should recognize that in social reproduction this process develops temporally through an intertwined relation between the production, circulation and distribution.
Highlights
Fred Moseley’s magnum opus, Money and Totality, the fruit of 20 years’ study and work, is representative of a fundamental divide in Marxian literature and offers an ambitious synthesis of the main new interpretations of Marx’s value theory since the 1980s
I will argue that the production of new total value and total surplus-value cannot be considered as determined by the initial conditions of production because the social reproduction of capital develops temporally over historical time
There is a short answer to the problems that arise from Moseley’s interpretation of the transformation of values into prices of production: he focuses his attention only on the ideal final condition eventually reached in the long run, when all industries’ average rates of profit are already equalized and market prices oscillate around equilibrium prices of production
Summary
Fred Moseley’s magnum opus, Money and Totality, the fruit of 20 years’ study and work, is representative of a fundamental divide in Marxian literature and offers an ambitious synthesis of the main new interpretations of Marx’s value theory since the 1980s. In Volume I and Volume II, Marx develops the analysis of capital in general (“the most essential properties which are common to all capitals” (Moseley 2016, 43; emphasis in the original), which determines the total surplus-value produced (the macro theory); this total is taken as a “predetermined given” (5) amount in the second level of abstraction (competition or many capitals) concerning the distribution of total surplus-value in Volume III (the micro theory).
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