On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, you wrote: > But I am interested in precisely those increases in labor > productivity which reduce production time. You have just fixated on > an weird reduction in production time which does not result from > increased labor productivity. I would suspect that this was deliberate in order to isolate the effect of turnover time from changes in labour productivity. >And then you claim that since in wine > making a reduction in production time clearly does not stem from > increased labor productivity--though it indeed allows for a reduction > in stock and thus the OCC--*any* increase in profitability from > reduced production time should be ascribed to a reduced OCC. But this > is just a fallacy of generalizing from the clearly idiosyncratic. The reason why increase in labour productivity increase the rate of surplus value is surely due to the prodution of relative surplus value - the cheapening of the elements of the real wage. The only three ways the rate of surplus value can change are 1. changes in the length of the working day 2. cheapening or dearing of the wage bundle in labour terms 3. changing the wage bundle in real terms What you are doing is conflating effects that change the amount of physical product produced in an hours labour, with changes in the time taken for capital to be turned back into cash. The move to just in time production, does not of itself involve any change in labour productivity, merely a change in the amount of capital stocks that firms have to hold. Its effect on the rate of profit is thus via the organic composition. The issue can perhaps be clarified by dimensional analysis. The rate of exploitation s/v as the ratio of two flows is a dimensionless number. The organic composition of capital can be treated in two ways c/v which is a flow measure, and as such is also a dimensionless number. Or as C/v which is of the form C person hours person hours - = ---------------- = ---------- v person hours per year persons Note that person hours per year is an expression of the form persons x time ---------- time and thus simplifies to persons So organic composition of capital in the form C/v expresses the number of hours or years of embodied labour existing per worker. As such it must clearly be affected by the labour embodied in partially made goods. The other form of organic composition, which lends itself to empirical work in i/o tables is c/v which is the ratio of two flows and as such is dimensionless. It expresses the division of the labour force into those producing means of production and those producing consumer goods. The dimensional calculus has been known since Newton, and is fundamental to having a clear understanding of how to distinguish flow from stock quantities. The practice of the classical economists, including Marx of analysing things in terms of fixed production periods can obscure the dimensional properties of the quantities that they are dealing with. -- Paul Cockshott, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland 0141 330 3125 mobile:07946 476966 paul@cockshott.com http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/people/personal/wpc/ http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/index.html
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