In response to Christian:
> >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.
I would argue that the value of the morally depreciated means has
itself changed, which does not mean of course that the sum of money
that the capitalist class laid out for them has changed.
> The terms for that realization are wages and debt.
don't understand yr point. Are you saying that wages and credit lines
have to be sufficient for the surplus value that has been produced to
be realized? Are you saying that the full value of older equipment
can be realized if demand is strong enough? Are there any limits on
the autonomous creation of demand? And even if value and surplus
value are fully realized, profitability can still founder due to more
fundamental difficulties in the very production of sv, and firms may
then not make use of the lines of credit that they have and in this
uncertain environment workers will not use their available credit
either. The problem would then not be insufficient credit and
purchasing power. The problem would be that there would be no use of
the credit and purchasing power that are already available. We can
explore the connection between this critque of underconsumption with
Keynes' liquidity trap, along with the relation between Marx's
falling profit rate and Keynes' marginal efficiency of capital and
the relation between Marx's theory of accumulation and Keynes'
effective demand.
Of course our bourgeois Macroeconomic textbooks don't do us the
favor. Even the radical Keynesian ones.
At any rate, I would think a Marxist would keep the analytical focus
on growing problems in production and the class struggle therein
rather than in difficulties in the realization of surplus value in
terms of inadequate market based demand. Why would we want to give an
analytical focus to our theory that complements bourgeois economics'
obsession with exchange relations. Luxemburg made a mistake, I
think, in seeking the limits of capital in the market.
>But you can explain this without reference to values, can't you?
maybe, i am asking how.
> 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.)
don't follow.
> or (b) reserve value as a ground for the class-existential analysis
>of capital's limits.
the system finds its historic limits in workers' turning their
resistance to the extraction of their surplus labor time in the
process of production to a revolutionary struggle. It is possible
however that the system will annihilate both classes or (I suppose)
that a managerial mode of production could replace the capitalist one.
>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.
Though not properly recognized in equilibrium theories.
>
>As per the crisis thing: I'm not quite sure I get why Marxists think
>it's an accomplishment to predict repeated crises.
because it provides an explanation unlike GET?
> 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?
We are talking about the underlying explanation, not reading tea leaves.
> 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),
it's not possible to do so. a theory can be explanatory while not
being predictive in the strict sense that you indicate.
> 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.
who's advising policy makers?
> 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.
If they think the major problems in the capitalist system
(unemployment, intensification of labor, wipe outs of workers'
savings) will be solved once we social democrats convince US policy
makers to run up the federal debt to 50 or so % of GDP (unlikely that
we could; and surely counterproductive if we were successful), they
are no less crackpot realists than those who imagine that we will
indeed live in a complex social system not based on the exploitation
of labor.
> That seems a lot more realistic than imagining that someday we'll
>live in some complex social system that is immune to crisis.
rb
>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.
