waterfall should not be autonomously providing surplus value , devoid of labor-time , which it is and Marx concedes this fact . Consequently , contrary to TSSI , value is not solely a product of socially necessary labor-time , meaning , value can be created outside the production sphere and Marx inadvertently acknowledges this fact , when he states a natural force , like a waterfall , does not belong to the sphere of production . Inadvertently , this also opens the door to the damning conclusion that value can be produced outside of production , such as we see with gold and the waterfall , assuming these two examples are not anomalies .
Moreover , this means that TSSI is implausible and a bastardization of what Marx said and meant in Capital . If the point of any interpretation is to make a text make sense , as Kliman states , then the point is also to acknowledge the discrepancies within a text , with honesty . The point is not to pick and choose premises , here and there , in order to arrive at a dubious interpretation which somehow makes sense and retains a sense of fuzzy totality , a suspicious totality , which comes at the insurmountable cost of textual verity , honest scholarship and the basic fact that Marx ’ s Capital is riddled with internal-inconsistencies . There is no side-stepping this fact , TSSI has skewed Marx ’ s statements and premises in a feeble attempt to refute the fact of internal inconsistency , within Marx ’ s Capital . To quote , Kliman , “ Marx ’ s value theory would be necessarily wrong if it were internally inconsistent … An internally inconsistent theory simply cannot be right ”[ 7 ] and this is exactly the case with Marx ’ s analysis , it is internally inconsistent and thus is not completely right , hence , the reason why the charge of internal inconsistency has lasted so long and the reason why so many attempts have been made to refashion Marx ’ s analysis into something new yet inspired by Marx ’ s analysis . The point is not to beat a dead horse over and over again , the point is to accept the facts . The point is not to retreat into ideology and Marxist fetishism , as the TSSI has clearly done , but to move on .
II
Another one of the many fundamental premises of TSSI is its fundamental claim that “ valuation is temporal , so input and output prices can differ ”[ 8 ], meaning that output prices / values of commodities can be lower than the input prices / values of the means of production initially going into the production process at the beginning . However , this leads to an internal inconsistency within Marx ’ s analysis in the sense that Marxist holy trinity of equalities becomes out of whack , if inputs and output prices differ , substantially . First , according to Marx and the TSSI , the three aggregate value-price equalities are :
* Total profit equals total surplus value . * Total price equals total value . * The aggregate “ price ” rate of profit equals the aggregate “ value ” rate of profit … [ And ,] in Marx ’ s view , these aggregate equalities were immensely significant [ as ]… they confirmed both the law of value and his theory that all profit has its origin in the exploitation of workers . [ 9 ]
However , as shown previously , it is evident that profits do not have their sole origin in the exploitation of workers , but also have their origin in the free exploitation of the soil , which