My thinking on this is inspired by Carl Wennerlind's history of the English financial revolution, "Casualties of Credit." You can have inflation or you can have a bursting bubble, such as the South Sea that concludes Wennerlind's account. But in the meantime it is the expectation of a given return that is driving both prices and the enterprise of surplus value extraction. It's all good on paper until something gets out of whack.
I'm also thinking in terms of an extension from Wennerlind's focus on *casualties* (war dead and wounded, slaves in the slave trade, counterfeiters hanged) to Robert Steinfeld's focus on *coercion* of workers in the 19th century in "Coercion, Contract and Free Labor In the Nineteenth Century." Steinfeld overturns the notion that employment in the metropolitan economy in the 19th century was "at will", pointing to the frequency of prosecution of workers under the Master and Servant Act in the U.K. and forfeiture of wages in the U.S. (not to mention slavery in the U.S. South). The "reserve army of labor" may have prevailed during slumps but in the boom years, employers resorted to legal sanctions to discipline and retain their workforces. I'm also reading archival material on the anti-union initiatives of the 1830s (Senior and Tomlinson's "Report on Combinations" and Tufnell's report from Lancasire for the Factory Inquiries Commission). The coercive regime and the arguments of the likes of Senior and Tufnell make the most sense given a model in which the investors subscribe to a preordained return on investment and entrepreneur has recourse to all sorts of legal sanctions to extract the requisite amount of surplus value. On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 6:56 PM, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote: > Sandwichman wrote: > > I would challenge the implicit assumption that surplus value is first > > produced and then redistributed. It might seem "intuitively obvious" that > > you can't redistribute something that doesn't exist yet but of course you > > can. You just distribute claims on future wealth creation. That's what > > capitalization is about. > > but distributions of claims on future wealth creation is simply a > matter of promises. Not all promises are lived up to or enforced. If > more wealth is promised than is created and those promises are > actually followed through on, what results is inflation (to reconcile > promises with reality). > > > So I have in mind a model where profit, interest and rent come first and > > then the imperative is to extract the surplus value corresponding with > those > > claims. > > yes, it's likely that part of the dynamic is that individuals fight to > make sure that the promises to them are fulfilled, even if it's at the > expense of others. But the actual amount of surplus-value produced > depends not only on what the capitalists want but also the resistance > of workers. > > > Of course the process is circular, so it would be difficult to point > > to a specific unit of surplus value going to a specific rent, interest or > > profit claim. > > yes, the link between specific units of surplus-value produced and > rent, interest, and profit claims is on the macroeconomic level, not > the micro level. > -- > Jim Devine / "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to > be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But > in poetry, it's the exact opposite." -- Paul Dirac > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > -- Sandwichman
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