re Allin's 5420 > > >Now consider an innovation that cuts turnover time or "production >time". To isolate the effect in question we imagine that the >innovation does not reduce the labour time (worker-hours) required to >produce one unit of the product. > For instance, suppose a wine-maker >comes up with a new additive that enables them to cut the time of >fermentation and maturation without hurting quality, so that the >calendar time from "grapes in" to "bottles of wine out" is cut in >half, while the number of worker-hours embodied in a bottle of wine >remains unchanged. (In practice, of course, it's likely the latter would be reduced too, but that's a different matter.) How does this isolate the effect if the effect I want to study is exactly the effect of an increase in labor productivity as manifested in the reduced production time that thereby allows the variable capital advanced to be reduced? this bohm bawerkian fascination with wine making just has to stop! He used it to show how time itself putatively increased value without any greater labor expenditure, now you are using wine making to show that greater labor productivity does not, cet par, allow capital to enforce a higher rate of surplus value or exploitation and thereby improve its profitability. > > >Another perspective on the innovation is that it will reduce "variable >capital advanced" (the capitalist now need "advance" only half the >wages that he used to) and hence raise the annual rate of surplus >value. But this doesn't explain the increase in the rate of profit, >it's just an arithmetical side-effect. What do you mean by side effect--that the annual rate of surplus value is merely a subjective measure? > What's "really happened" is >that K has fallen relative to annual v. I don't know. I don't think all the objections Jerry and I have raised as to why we don't clearly have a reduced OCC with decreased production time have been met. Rakesh
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