Justin writes in regard to moral depreciation: >. I don't see why the LTV has to be true to explain this. I have >never denied, nor does the the most orthodox bourgeois economist, >that if you can save labor costs by adopting a new production >technique, that people who have sunk costs in onld labor intensive >production techniques are going to have trouble making money. But we >don't have to talk about value, least of do we have to say that >value is a quantity measured by SNALT. > >
But you just described the whole loss from moral depreciation in terms of labor, though not SNALT. The question is not whether the phenomenon is recognized but the adequacy of concepts to grasp it. I don't understand your alternative. As a result of moral depreciation, the older means of production as use values have not changed; nor has the concrete labor embodied therein changed. What changes is the the aliquot of homogeneous, social, and abstract labor time represented by those means. The key here is the duality of labor--Marx's key discovery. So here is one answer as to why the means of production are in fact not merely use values or physical inputs but values. Let me say as a side note that Marx begins with inputs as neither physical goods nor values. He begins with invested money capital, the money invested as constant and variable capital, and refers to that monetary sum as the cost prices of commodities. Marx's theory is thus closer to Keynes' monetary theory of production than it is to Sraffa's technical input-output matrix. Shane Mage, Paul Mattick Jr, Guglielmo Carchedi and Fred M all point out that it's a misconception that Marx's inputs are in the form of values; the c and v columns in his transformation tables indicate invested sums of money capital which needs to be valorized. Again: for Marx a given precondition in his transformation tables are the very cost prices that indicate a sum of money that has already been laid out. It makes no less to call for the transformation of a sum of money that has already been laid out. The idea that Marx's transformation tables have to be completed is based on a misconception of what the given precondition is in the circuit of capital--which is of course the initial M. Which is not to say that there isn't a mistake in Marx's transformation tables, but it's not that sum of money invested as constant and variable capital has to be (or could conceivably be) retroactively transformed. Rakesh
