About five years ago I wrote:
"From table 13.5 in the Analytical perspectives annex to the US federal budget, <http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/apers.html> http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/apers.html we can get an idea of total US capital stocks by category, in rounded trillions of 2007 dollars. We can add US-owned assets abroad from BEA data e.g. <http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/international/intinv/2008/pdf/intinv07.pdf> http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/international/intinv/2008/pdf/intinv07.pdf and financial assets from McKinsey <http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/Mapping_global/executive_summary.a sp> http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/Mapping_global/executive_summary.as p to obtain the following kind of table for 1980 and 2007: 1980: 2007: _____________________________________________________________________ Publicly owned US physical assets: 5.2 9.7 Privately owned US physical residential assets 7.5 17.4 Privately owned, non-residential US physical plant & equipment 7.6 14.8 US Physical inventories 1.6 2.0 US Land 6.4 16.9 Net claims by foreigners to US assets -0.4 8.3 Total US assets owned abroad (BEA) 2 17.6 Total US-owned financial assets (McKinsey) circa 5 (est) 56.1 (McKinsey 2006 figure; the 2007 figure would be near 60 trillion). of which government financial assets (excl. Fed Reserve 0.5 0.6 GDP ($trillion) 10 13.6 US Employed Labor force (millions) 99 144 US Population (millions) 228 301 Marxists will talk about the "expanded reproduction of capital" with deep and meaningful profundity, but this is an approximate quantitative indication of the empirical expanded reproduction of capital. And it is a capital structure in which non-productive physical capital is larger in value that productive physical capital, and in which total physical capital assets and total financial assets are nowadays similar in size. The budget document also provides figures for human capital (the value of labor power) and for R&D capital, but I did not include them in this table. " <http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/OPE/archive/0812/0060.html> http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/OPE/archive/0812/0060.html If you are capable of understanding what this table means, you realize how misguided the FROP doctrinaires are. When I presented this simple finding five years ago to OPE-Lers (following a lead from Max, if I remember correctly) they had almost nothing to say. They were much more comfortable about expounding their cherished "philosophy of exploitation" and natter on about "value" and suchlike. A few students and Paul Cockshott objected that including the financial assets was wrong, because it involved double counting, or because the assets were "fictitious" anyway. Which goes to show the rarified world that some academics live in. I still haven't got around to relating this data to the total debt structure, but it is certainly worth doing, if you are e.g. capable of understanding something more than Niall Ferguson's "debt to GDP ratio". J. PS - On "human capital", Marx commented as follows: "Apologetic economists present the matter wrongly... They say that the same money here realizes two capitals : the buyer - the capitalist - converts his money capital into living labour-power, which he incorporates into his productive capital ; on the other hand, the seller - the worker - converts his commodity -labour-power - into money that he spends as revenue, which is precisely what enables him to sell his labour-power over and over again and thus to maintain himself; his labour-power is thus actually his capital in the commodity form, from which he constantly draws his revenue. In point of fact, labour-power is his capacity (ever renewing and reproducing itself), not his capital. It is the only commodity that he can constantly sell, and he has to sell it in order to live, but it operates as capital (variable capital) only in the hands of the buyer, the capitalist. If a man is perpetually forced to sell his labour-power over and over again, i.e. to sell himself, to someone else, this proves, according to these economists, that he is a capitalist, because he always has a 'commodity ' (himself) for sale. In this sense even a slave would be a capitalist, even though he is sold once and for all as a commodity by a third person ; for the nature of this commodity, the working slave, not only requires that its buyer put it to work each day, but also that he give it the means of subsistence that it needs in order to be able to work again." - Karl Marx, Capital, Volume II, Penguin ed., chapter 20 section 10, pp. 515-516.
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