From: Paul Cockshott (wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK)
Date: Fri Apr 23 2004 - 10:49:05 EDT
Are you talking in stock or flow terms. Stock terms are relevant when one is looking at the rate of profit as a rate of growth in value per annum. Flow terms are relevant when one is looking at the rate of profit in terms of profit as a percent of turnover. Or, if you are addressing Paul Zs question of the expansion of the mode of prodution into other modes of production since what is really happening here is that people are being transfered. In flow terms, the dimension of variable capital is people, specifically the number of people needed to reproduce the work force in the capitalist sector. Beyond this I think there are mistakes in your outlook: You write: -------------------------- Capital must take the money-form for there to be an accumulation of capital. I.e. following the actualization of surplus value, capitalists must reinvest more money by buying more capital (in the form of c and v). ------------------------- This is implicitly a stock analysis you are making but even in this form it wildly wrong. Your account only makes sense with gold money, with modern money an accumulation of money is a purely paper operation and does not represent an accumulation of value. To evaluate the accumulation of capital stock what one has to do is estimate the labour content of the means of production, unsold stocks, and work in progress. If one just added up money you would get a measure that had little bearing on reality since in a modern economy money is a zero sum game, debit and credit balances equate. -------------------------------- You wrote Since both c and v, required to purchase means of production and labour-power, take the money-form, it necessarily follows -- I believe -- that _if_ the wages of wage-workers whose salaries are paid out of v rises then the accumulation of capital may have increased (_if_ one defines accumulation of capital as Paul Z has done) even though the quantity of productive wage-workers may have remained stable or diminished (which itself is a possibility which is not allowed for in his perspective). --------------- There is a kernel of truth in this, the number of workers required to reproduce the real wage may rise even if the total working population does not. The problem comes from trying to stretch a concept beyond its proper area of definition. Accumulation of capital is a change in stocks. Extension of the mode of production is a flow issue, relating to the number of people employed. Accumulation of capital without and extension of the mode of production tends to result in a falling rate of profit. ------------- Gerry Yet, he has also claimed that when there is an accumulation of capital the quantity of productive wage-workers must increase. However, suppose that the increase in v above is solely attributable to a 5% increase in wages for these workers. In that circumstance an increase in the accumulation of capital will not necessarily be associated with an increase in the size of the employed productive wage-labour force. --------------------- The circumstances you describe certain do happen at times, they occured in the UK int he 60s and arguably in other european countries in the 80s and 90s. I doubt that they occur on a world scale today, but I may be wrong, one would need a lot of empirical data to check.
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