The Deconstruction of the Temporal-Single-System-Interpretation TSSI | Page 9

determining worth founded on two different, incommensurable premises. For example, Marx
argues in Capital (Volume One), the price-system can operate, and does operate, independently
of labor-time calculations and the value-system. The pricing-system can only do this, if it is a
completely independent system from any value-determinations founded on labor-time. As Marx
states, “the possibility that the price may diverge from…value, is inherent in the price-form
itself”[18] and the reason for these inherent divergences is the fact that price is not strictly, or if
at all, based on labor-time, “the price-form…[for Marx]…harbors a qualitative contradiction,
with the result that price ceases altogether to express value”[19]. The reason price ceases
altogether to express value is because price is inherently incommensurable with value, it is a
system completely independent of value, due to the fact that it has a different foundation than the
value-system. Marx is correct to argue that the problem of commensurability between price and
value is inherent in the price-form as we are dealing with two different systems with two
different foundations. And Marx readily acknowledges this, when he states:
Things which in and for themselves are not commodities, things such as, conscience,
honor, [vacant unused land] etc., can be offered for sale by their holders, and thus acquire
the form of commodities through their price. Hence, a thing can, formally speaking, have
a price without having a value. The expression of price is…imaginary. [20]
It may be correct, as TSSI stipulates, that the Marxist value-system is strictly founded upon
labor-time, but the price-system certainly is not. In fact, the price-system, according to Marx, is
founded on the imagination. As Marx states, “to establish…price it is sufficient for [a
commodity] to be equated…in the imagination” [21]. This means that value and price have
incommensurable foundations, Marxist value is founded on labor-time and price is founded on
the imagination. In essence, these are two different systems for assigning numerical sums onto
commodities, stemming from two different foundations, i.e., incommensurable premises. Price
can be accommodated to value, but this is a distortion and a reduction of the pricing-system to
the Marxist value-system in the sense that the price-system, being founded on the imagination,
exceeds the strict parameters of the Marxist value-system, that is, socially nece ssary labor-time.
As Marx states,
Although invisible…value…is signified through [its] equality with [price], even though
this relation with [price] exists in [the] head, so to speak….the expression of the value of
commodities in [price] is a purely ideal act, we may use purely imaginary or ideal gold to
perform this operation. [22]
Of course, TSSI acknowledges that “the distinction between value and price exists in real
life”[23], but at the abstract level of economic totality, this distinction disappears, however, this
is a logical contradiction within TSSI and Marx’s Capital, which invariably always reverberates
across Marx’s holy trinity of economic equalities, forever destabilizing them, unless some form
of gross numerical manipulations is enacted. Moreover, TSSI acknowledged that “Marx himself
affirmed that value is a mental construct”[24], yet simultaneously, TSSI argues that Marx “value
is [strictly] determined by labor-time”[25]. This is a logical contradiction in the sense that TSSI