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