Quick response to Michael P's proposals for agreement:
Maybe we can agree on a few
fundamentals. Here are some of my candidates.
1. Marx was searching for a law of motion of capital.
Yes - but can we sustain any such naturalistic aspiration?
2. Capital is a comprehensive system rather than a simple relationship.
Yes
I think that we can agree here.
Much of the debates concern what comes next.
3. Capital entails the existence of fixed capital.
Maybe - anyway fixed capital is a significant fact of capitalist life, so it
needs to be understood
4. Capital must face uncertainty about the future. It cannot control its
fate, either as an individual capital or as capital in general.
Yes
5. Given this uncertainty, fixed capital can be revalued because of changing
economic or technical conditions, adding a bit of indeterminateness to
values.
Yes
6. Indeterminate values are not a problem because value is more important as
as social relation than as a algebraic problem to be solved.
Oh yes!
Michael W.