Lakshmi Rhone wrote:
> Nathan,
> Capital, vol 2 is a crucially important volume. Here I respectfully disagree
> with Professor Devine.
>
Yes indeed. I would like to add a further point:
Volume II develops concretely that the point that the value of
commodities isn't sufficient in order to be able to track the overall
economic cycle. One has to consider that different products differ
materially. This is, in my opinion, an example where Marx applied the idea of
the non-rational nature of value concretely and brilliantly.
Thus in a crucial passage he writes:
"So long as we looked upon the production of value and the value of the
product of capital individually, the bodily form of the commodities produced
was wholly immaterial for the analysis, whether it was machines, for
instance, corn, or looking glasses. It was always but a matter of
illustration, and any branch of production could have served that purpose
equally well. . . . So far as the reproduction of capital was concerned, it
was sufficient to assume that that portion of the product in commodities
which represents capital-value finds an opportunity in the sphere of
circulation to reconvert itself into its elements of production and thus into
its form of productive capital; just as it is sufficient to assume that both
the labourer and the capitalist find in the market those commodities on which
they spend their wages and the surplus-value. THIS MERELY FORMAL MANNER OF
PRESENTATION IS NO LONGER ADEQUATE in the study of the total social capital
and of the value of its products. The reconversion of one portion of the
value of the product into capital and the passing of another portion into the
individual consumption of the capitalist as well as the working-class form a
movement within the value of the product itself in which the result of the
aggregate capital finds expression; and this movement IS NOT ONLY A
REPLACEMENT OF VALUE, BUT ALSO A REPLACEMENT IN MATERIAL and is therefore as
much bound up with the relative proportions of the value-components of the
total social product as with their use-value, their material shape."
(emphasis added) (Capital, vol. II, Part III, Chapter XX "Simple
Reproduction" Section I. "The Formulation of the Question", p. 398, Intl Pub
edition.)
This is relevant both to his view of the Tableau Economique, and his
development of an embryonic form of material balances.
Also, I have found that his criticism of Adam Smith resolving
exchange-value
into v + s (thus leaving out c, the used-up constant capital) turns out to
be more important than might at first seem.
-- Joseph Green
> 1. it shows the possibility of expanded reproduction without a permanent
> underconsumption problem. Naive underconsumptionism is still the dominant
> ideology of the left.
> 2. the importance of the gold sector in expanded reproduction intimates the
> need for a credit sector that can play the same function, and thus throws
> light on the necessity of credit
> 3. it isolates the difficulties that firms will have in both realizing the
> value and finding on the market the quantity of use values required for
> their individual expanded reproduction. This shows of course that Marx is as
> concerned with value and use value. The reproduction schema can thus be used
> to show why the reproduction of capital will be shot through with
> disturbances.
> 4. in showing the possibility of the reproduction of capital, the Vol II
> analysis underwrites the analysis of the capital-labor relation as an
> ongoing relation that becomes over time opposite in content to its "free
> exchange" form (chs 21-23 Capital volume I). This is one of the most
> important dialectical inversions that Marx demonstrates.
> 5. the early parts of volume 2 introduce the different circuits of capital
> and discuss turnover. Both are rich in implications. See for example Duncan
> Foley´s diagram of the reproduction of capital in terms of financing,
> production and commercial lags in his Understanding Capital. I think this is
> one of the best diagrams of the movement of capital that I have ever seen,
> and it is entirely faithful to the Marx of Capital, vol 2.
>
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