Rakesh in #4075: "While the total magnitude of new value added (NV) is determined by the value of the means of production consumed in the commodity output, plus the surplus value produced by workers, the s component of that total new value is determined by substracting from total new value (NV) THE REPLACEMENT COST of c and v. That cost however is determined at t+1. That is, the denominator of the rate of profit is defined by the inputs c+v at t; while the numerator s is determined by substracting from new value added (NV) the replacement costs of c+v at t+1." I think this is Brody's and Morishima's position but hardly Marx's. It seems to me that Marx's is interested in accounting the social expenditure of human labor power necessary to (re)produce a commodity at a certain point of time. This involves the reckoning of a *real* magnitude, i.e. the expenditure of human labor time that society has actually *made* up to this time. At the end of t, the "replacement cost" of c and v is not a real expenditure of labor time; it may be a potential or future expenditure that is not still carried out. If the process of value formation would be based on the "replacement cost" of c and v, we would have a mere "virtual" determination of value, not a real one. By the way, this is in line with the well accepted idea that value is merely an "ideal" or "logical" category put forward by Sombart and Bernstein, not an accounting category which aim is to reckon the real expenditure of human labor that society does. The idea that Marx is focusing in *real expenditures* of social human labor, not in "virtual" ones as the "replacement cost" approach suggests, is clearly expressed in the following passage: "All the labor contained in the yarn is *past labor*; and it is a matter of no importance that the labor expended to produce its constituent elements lies further back in the past than the labor expended on the final process, the spinning. The former stands, as it were, in the plusperfect, the latter in the perfect tense, but this does not matter." (Capital I, Penguin, 294; emphasis added.) A.R.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Oct 31 2000 - 00:00:09 EST