Jon Roffe - May 15

Title: From the Labour Theory of Value to the Philosophy of Market Price

Abstract:

This paper presents one piece of a broader effort to elaborate what I would like to call abstract market theory, an immanent theory of the market. Here, I will consider two challenges to the possibility of such a theory that arise from Marx’s work, namely the labour theory of value, and the opposition he advances (notably in book three of Capital and Theory of Surplus Value) between real capital and fictitious capital.
 
The central contention I would like to advance is that while Marx is right to assert that the labour theory of value accounts for the advent of the element of price (and thus the market, on my definition), it does not account for the ongoing subsistent reality of the market, which is integrally the regime of price. I will argue that the market as it now exists in no way intrinsically concerned with issues of value, but with a pricing-process that is real without being anchored in material reality – which is to say that the market has no mirror and is not a double of any underlying real economy. I will argue for this conclusion by considering the history and functioning of financial derivatives themselves, which I will assert (following Elie Ayache) to be the royal road to a philosophy of the market.

Biography:

Jon Roffe is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He is one of the editors of the journal Parrhesia (opens in a new window), and the author of Badiou's Deleuze (Acumen 2012), the book of aphorisms Muttering for the Sake of Stars (Surpllus 2012) and, with AJ Bartlett and Justin Clemens the forthcoming Lacan Deleuze Badiou (EUP 2013).

Download presentation audio (MP3, 12.8MB)