re5380 >In the numeric example in OPE-L:5373, > c v sv s/v r > Year 1 100 50 50 100% 33% > Year 2 100 25 50 200% 40% >v and s must be flows over the year, since these columns are used >to calculate the s/v column. But the v column must also be a >stock, since it and the c column, also a stock, are used to >calculate the rate of profit, r = s / (c + v). Using uppercase >letters to distinguish capital stock advanced from flows of >capital over the year, the equation is r = s / (C + V). > >Incidentally, turnover time can change because of changes in >production time but also because of a change in the time capital >must spend in circulation, such as the length of time that output >sits on the shelf before someone buys it. Charlie, Yet due to a reduction in production time, the capitalists find that they can use the product of labor after the first production cycle to extort surplus value from the workers at no additional cost in variable capital to themselves. Their variable capital costs have been reduced in half. This is a clear example of how workers are dominated by their own product. It is their own increased productivity that is enjoyed exclusively by the capitalist class in terms of a reduction in the variable capital which they must advance to appropriate a given sum of surplus value. That is, the 25 units of surplus value which the bourgeoisie appropriates in the second production cycle has effectively cost them nothing. You tell me that this cannot be a rise in the rate of surplus value because the rate of s in relation to lower case v does not change (note you didn't answer my query of what you would attribute the rise in profitability to if not a rise in the rate of exploitation; I would like to show my answer is better than any alternative). But this seems to me to mischaracterize the situation as the workers have obviously not gained at all from an improvement in their own productivity--in your terms the flow of variable capital remains the same though labor now produces twice as much. How can this not be a rise in the rate of exploitation as well as a diminishment of the workers' relative position to the owning class? And since it obviously is just that (so unlike Webber and Rigby, I am saying that a reduction in production time is itself, c.p, a rise in the rate of exploitation, not just like it in terms of its effects) , aren't you then wrong to insist that exploitation be measured as you insist it must be measured? Yours, Rakesh
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