Differences in interpreting Marx, as we have seen, tend to come down to three key questions. The first concerns how the value of labor power is understood. This will affect the treatment of variable capital. Is its value determined by the labor embodied in wage goods or the prices of those goods? The second question concerns the value of the means of production. This pertains to constant capital. Is the value of constant capital determined by the labor embodied in inputs or the amounts paid for them? The third question concerns whether value and price determination should be considered simultaneous or temporal. It was pointed out in the previous post that Marx’s aggregate equalities stand or fall with our answers to the first two questions. His equalities hold provided constant and variable capital are assumed to depend upon the prices of inputs and wage goods rather than the labor embodied in them. This approach is taken by all single-system interpretations, whether temporal or simultaneist. For the purposes of this post, adopting any of these interpretations would have been fine. However, the choice between temporality and simultaneity will sometimes be relevant later in the series. By way of background, the present post specifically introduces the temporal single-system interpretation (TSSI).

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