Allin, I shall reply in detail later. I must say that your claim that Marx is doing comparative statics in vol 1 disallows you from grasping his answer to the most puzzling paradox of all--that the most powerful instruments for reducing labor time suffer a dialectical inversion and become the most unfailing means for turning over the whole lifetime of the worker and his family into labor time at capital's disposal for its own valorization. part of marx's answer to this catastrope of a puzzle is that machines are *continuously* losing (or in danger) of losing value due to technological on going innovation (especially in the early years of new machine's life), that is to *continuous* reductions in the socially necessary labor time needed to produced any given amount of machine power. Moral depreciation is not a phenomenon which as I understand it can appear in a comparative static exercise in which the time periods are discrete. But I don't know your profession; is there room for moral depreciation in comparative statics? If not, then how can marx be said to be doing it? At any rate, please p. 528 Capital 1 (Vintage). Gotta go for now. All the best, Rakesh
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