>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.
Actually, the abstract labor time hasn't changed either. What's changed are the means
to realize or represent that time--which is now wasted or sunk. The terms for that
realization are wages and debt.
But you can explain this without reference to values, can't you? If you begin with
money (as below), there's no reason to keep value in the equation, unless you (a) buy
into Marx's moral taxonomy of credit money ("fictitious capital"--"the mother of all
insane forms," "a fetish," "money breeding money," etc.) or (b) reserve value as a
ground for the class-existential analysis of capital's limits. Neither of these seem
necessary to get at the baleful effects of capital, which seem pretty evident even in
the enchanted world we live in.
As per the crisis thing: I'm not quite sure I get why Marxists think it's an
accomplishment to predict repeated crises. Anybody can do that--in fact, most
leftists--save maybe Doug and Anwar Shaikh--have been predicting recession,
depression, or financial calamity for the past 5 years. So what? As a defense of a
theoretical model, this seems pretty weak, since (a) hardly anyone gets the timing of
the crisis right (ie Brenner, whose (great) work has been pointing to the big one
since 1997), and (b) in the absence of that what you give is the stern policy advice
to flush the whole system, cause capital will always produce crises. Again, so what?
At least in theory, what social dems like Godley and Izuretia have going for them is
that they think there are ways of mitigating, though not preventing, crises. That
seems a lot more realistic than imagining that someday we'll live in some complex
social system that is immune to crisis.
Christian
>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.
