From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@stanford.edu)
Date: Mon Aug 26 2002 - 12:33:51 EDT
re Paul C's 7544 > >Nothing inherently malthusian about the effects of >zero percent interest rates on the direction of capital >accumulation. I thought the question is why there would be a kind of overaccumulation of capital in the sense that the ratio of the physical surplus to the physical to the physical stock of capital would fall. Do zero percent interest rates explain this kind of overaccumulation? > >Note that this economy is in simple reproduction but has a potention >von-Neumann growth rate of 100% since this is the expansion ratio >of the basic goods sector. A capitalist economy cannot in fact have a potential growth rate of 100% since that would imply the capitalist class lives on air as the entire surplus value would be capitalized. Otto Bauer was right to build a column for capitalist consumption into his revised reproduction schemes, for if capitalist consumption were eliminated in the the course of accumulation process--as Grossmann showed it would be on his assumptions--accumulation would have no meaning to the capitalist class and would cease forthwith. In Bauer's scheme this happens around period 21. > > >This is in no way contrary to the labour theory of value. If >there is no human labour input, the labour theory of value >simply does not apply to this case. As Pack presents the case, what this 'model' shows is that the elimination of living labor from the process of production need not lead to a collapse in the rate and mass of profit and thus the breakdown of the capitalist system. > > > > >> But this assumes the method of determination which Moseley (monetary >> macro), Shaikh (fixed point iteration) and TSS have all criticized in >> their respective ways. For each of these three respectives there >> would in fact be no profit in a fully automated economy. > >Why on earth should there be no profit in a fully automated >economy? If profit is just another name for a form of unpaid living labor then one would expect that the elimination of living labor would mean the end of profit. Well wouldn't Gil say that this thought experiment shows that private profit results fundamentally from the differential ownership of scarce assets, not the exploitation of living labor in the process of production? > >What price structure could the above economy have that >entailed not profit? Prices could be assigned to goods, but would there be a tendency towards the market's own generation of so called prices of production in a fully automated economy? All the best, Rakesh
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Sep 06 2002 - 17:17:38 EDT