Charles Brown: > Capital is, in its most important sense, not a thing. Capital is a > relationship ( a private property relationship) between people with > respect to things. Capital is a relationship between wage laborers and > capitalists with respect to means of production ( instruments of > production and raw materials) and the products of the labor. The > capitalist owns as private property the products of the wage-laborer's > labor, as well as the means of production. The wage-laborer owns only > her labor power. > > I know "capital" is used to refer to means of production, things, > (constant capital) and labor power ( variable capital) , too.
Mighty Max wrote: > Sure, but KM thought it enough of a thing to posit all sorts of > mathematical formulae > including its constituent parts (fixed, variable, etc.) Natural assets (the natural fertility of the soil, etc.) has a use-value and can have an exchange-value. Use-values cannot be quantified because they are multidimensional. (Neoclassical economics "quantifies" use-value as "utility" by looking at it from an individual perspective: what would I pay for that? That means that there are billions of different measures of use-value and they all vary over time.) It's only when the soil is owned and on the market that we can attach a quantitative measure, i.e., exchange-value or price. When the soil is owned as private property, we're likely living in a capitalist society. (Poland had private property in land under bureaucratic socialism, I believe, but I don't know what kind of property rights they had. Could the land be sold?) In that case, land is a form of "capital," i.e., capitalist property. The asset price of land partly reflects the non-scarcity of labor-power (the reserve army), which allows a positive profit rate to exist. The effort to measure "natural capital" as a number (dollars and cents) seems instead to be part of the creation of an imaginary organization that represents all of society (including future generations). Then, the prices of different pieces of nature can be set in terms of the goals of that organization. They are "shadow prices" of an imaginary democratic socialism of sorts. I don't see how this goes very far without having an actual democratic socialism of sorts to give a real meaning to imaginary prices. Alternatively, we could value pieces of nature according to their replacement cost (since historical cost makes no sense). It takes X trillion dollars to clean up the destruction of the salmon runs, so they are worth X trillion dollars as part of the total "natural capital." The problem is that such costs reflect the actual society we live in and the relative scarcities and demands it creates. It also misses the distribution of costs among different groups. That is, who is paying the cost, the Native Americans, the fisheries, the fish-eaters? -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
