On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 10:24 AM, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Last year, I made 30% on my long term treasuries in my retirement >> account, because the long term interest rates went down bad. Say, I >> started with 1 billion dollars and ended up with 1.3 billion dollars. >> Under this assumption, my economic rent is 300,000,000 dollars. How >> much of this is surplus value? > > The surplus-value would be all of what's left after you send me a > check for my share of the total. Actually, none of this activity > involves the production of surplus-value and contributions to > society's pool of surplus-value. Instead, it's a matter of increasing > your _claims_ on society's pool of surplus-value. If that pool stays > the same size, then you are gaining at the expense of other > speculators. >
I always had the impression that surplus value was not a concept that applied only to capitalism, but that capitalism had as a critical core a particular way of assigning claims on surplus value. For instance, under some forms of feudalism the primary producer of surplus value was agricultural labor, but the primary means of claiming that surplus value was rent. True? -- Facebook: Gar Lipow Twitter: GarLipow Solving the Climate Crisis web page: SolvingTheClimateCrisis.com Grist Blog: http://grist.org/author/gar-lipow/ Online technical reference: http://www.nohairshirts.com _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
