Russ writes:
>This commoditiness is social, it is not in the object itself. It extends
>only so long as the object is _available_ for exchange.
>Robinsonades are always useful here: when a buccaneer steals some treasure
>it is still a commodity, but when he buries his treasure it ceases to be
>one. When Crusoe digs it up it does not become a commodity. Only when Crusoe
>returns with his new found booty to a system of commodity exchange does it
>become once more a commodity.
Fine.
>And it's the same with factories I guess. But I wonder whether, from a
>Marxist angle, if this is all an absurdity: can capital _ever_ be truely
>fixed?
The reason he called it fixed was that unlike labour-power it wasn't a
factor in the variance between M' and M''. Fixed capital just passes on its
value to the commodity it's applied to, it adds nothing new. So it's only
fixed in terms of generating value.
Variable capital, on the other hand, exchanges value for the commodity
labour-power, employs the labour-power and bingo out the other side comes
more value than was put in, because the value of the labour-power employed
was less than the value of the labour the labour-power employed was able to
add to the commodities in question.
C' with a given value becomes C'' with a greater value, and the solution to
this magical equation, where something appears to come from nothing is in
the exchange of labour-power with capital. The capital invested in
labour-power actually buys the right to the labour produced by the
labour-power, hence the value coming out is more than the value put in,
hence the capital invested here appears to be variable.
Cheers,
Hugh
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