[SydPhil] [UWS seminar] Jon Roffe: From the Labour Theory of Value to a Philosophy of Market Price

[Philosophy@UWS]

Philosophy Seminars 2013
The Writing and Society Research Centre and Philosophy at UWS present:

Jon Roffe
University of Melbourne

TITLE: From the labour theory of value to a philosophy of market price

DATE/TIME: Wednesday 15 May, 3.30 pm - 5.00 pm

PLACE: University of Western Sydney, Bankstown Campus, Building 3, Room 3.G.54  [How to get to Bankstown Campus]<http://www.uws.edu.au/campuses_structure/cas/campuses/bankstown>

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 (www.parrhesiajournal.org<http://www.parrhesiajournal.org>), 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).

For the entire 2013 program of the Philosophy seminar series at UWS see: http://www.uws.edu.au/philosophy/philosophy@uws/events/research_seminars_2013

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Mariana Fragueiro
Administration Coordinator, Philosophy Research Initiative
University of Western Sydney
Bankstown Campus Building 5
Locked Bag 1797
Penrith NSW  2751
+61 2 9772 6190



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