Marx develops his economic theory in Capital in a rather peculiar way. This paper focuses on some of these peculiarities, especially his attempt to base his account of prices and derivative entities (profit, rate of profit, etc.) on the labour theory of value. Although he may be said to have failed in this, there is still some kind of 'Marxist' theory of prices possible. This is due to both, the so-called fundamental theorem (linking profit and surplus-value) and the possibility, shown by Sraffa and others, to determine prices from the physical parameters of production. By adding on an earlier paper of mine, in which the surplus-value theory has been reconstructed within the structuralistic framework, this paper sketches such a reconstruction for the basic parts of a full-blown Marxist economic theory of capitalistic production.
. In a previous paper ~ I construed part of Marx's e c o n o m i c theory as a sequence of four so-called theory elements T O . . . . . T 3, introducing the concepts of value, money, labour power, and surplus-value, respectively. I did this within the structuralist framework developed by Sneed, Stegmiiller, and others.2 H e n c e each theory-element T t was considered as a pair ( K j, F ) consisting of a mathematical structure K t and a so-called domain of intended applications, P , which is identified with a certain sub-structure of K j. T h e claim c o n n e c t e d with a theory-element ( K t, I t} is that the " c o r e " K t is, in fact, applicable to P , i.e., that it contains a proper extension of F.
In the earlier paper I had focused on the domains I t and their connections. In this paper I am going to expand my reconstruction and to dig into some peculiarities of the d e v e l o p m e n t of Marx's e c o n o m i c theory which are mainly c o n n e c t e d with the cores K t. I shall do this, however, in a less formal way and, incidentally, by relating Marx's ideas to concepts more familiar to c o n t e m p o r a r y economists. My account will exhibit certain difficulties and, indeed, severe shortcomings of Marx's theory. I am not mainly interested, however, in the question " M a r x right or w r o n g ? " . T h e aim of my considerations is more to find out reasons Marx may have had for presenting his theory in the way he did, although he seems to have anticipated at least some Erkennmis 30 (1989) 147-164.