Let these few remarks be suitably extended and generalized. Marx is clearly correct in the Grundrisse, and oddly, perversely, the obscurantist philosophical jargon in which he expresses his musings captures well the combination of subjective and objective transformations – psychological and institutional – through which goods become commodities. Exchange value as such emerges, and finally capital per se, self-expanding value, comes to dominate the senses, the consciousness, the administrative decisions, the very a priori principles of rational choice themselves, of bourgeois capitalist society. It is as mad to suppose that one could have capitalism without those transformations, as it is to suppose – that a feudal manor could be run on the principles of a modern agribusiness, with no ill effects to the local religion or the idyllic communal bonds between lord and peasant.
The physical quantities model of a capitalist economy is thus an inadequate model. Its critique of Marx’s value theory is wrong. The movement from physical quantities to values, and from values to profits, is not a detour, a meaningless mathematical excursion, because in the real world of capitalism, market prices, interest rates, and wages, are not mere accounting devices derivable from the technical coefficients of production.
The Philosopher's Stone
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