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Alejandro,
three simple questions (I am just curious of the answers, I don't think
I'll be able to enter the debate):
(i) according to you, when time enters as an essential category in Capital?
I would argue that this does not happen in the first chapters. Is it not
the beginning of Capital an analysis of a 'point in time' (what we can
argue looking at the final exchange on the commodity market)? Of course the
commodities exchanged are commodities produced, but this is not the focus
of the analysis when Marx analyses the dialectics of commodity and money
etc.
(ii) according to you, if we assume that the prices of the output are the
same as the prices of the input, this cancels the processual nature of the
cycle of capital? And if so, why? I would say that time i essential even if
there are no 'dated' magnitudes in the models we construct from Marx. E.g.:
circuit models very often have no time subscripts, but they are surely 'in
time', talking about a succession of phases within a given period: this
would remain even if the prices of the input are evaluated as equal to the
prices of the output.
(iii) have you read Hicks on time and economics? Don't you think it may be
relevant for the topic under discussion?
ciao
riccardo
At 22:34 +0100 5-04-2000, Alejandro Ramos wrote:
>Re #2724
>
>Alejandro:
>>>I think Marx conceives the C-M-C and the M-C-M' as real time, historical
>>>processes which cannot be collapsed into an "instantaneous", "logical"
>moment.
>
>Chris:
>>Hm. I think that at the early levels of abstraction the question of time is
>>not important; what is important is the 'distribution' of the moments of
>>value; C is its particularity, M its universality, and their unification in
>>an individual is achieved in the metamorphoses, certainly a process rather
>>then a synchronic relation to be sure.
>
>I cannot imagine a "level of abstraction" in Capital in which time is not
>important. Marx always analyses *processes* and those procesees are
>embedded in time, are historical processes. The commodity itself cannot be
>undestood, imo, out of time. Any commodity is a result of a production
>process and that production took some time in the past. The capital cycle,
>at any "level of abstraction" you examine it, is embedded in time. You have
>a starting point and an ending point, and what makes the difference is the
>time elapsed. So, as you say in the last part of the above piece, the
>"unification is achieved in the metamorphoses", i.e. as a temporal process.
>So, I don't see at what "early level of abstraction" you can abstract from
>time in Marx's analysis.
>
>Alejandro
Riccardo Bellofiore
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