From: Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM
Date: Thu Nov 04 2004 - 07:37:26 EST
This of course does not actually make them fixed capital, but it does have a certain rationality in that it views the value tied up in arms as a deduction from the total capital stock available to the national capitalist class. ====================================== Paul C, Well, couldn't one say the same thing about all unproductive expenditures? I.e. i) any amount of surplus value which isn't used for the purposes of productive consumption is _ipso facto_ unproductively consumed; ii) any amount of value which isn't being used to reproduce value could be seen as being wasteful from the perspective of capitalist rationality. The problem is that only that portion of the capital devoted to military commodity production which takes the form of means of production could be said to represent constant capital. The military goods themselves, unless they _are_ means of production, are 'simply' a portion of the total commodity output. How this is represented in a simplified reproductive model is a question: unless the military goods take the form of something like food for the troops it could hardly be said to represent means of consumption for the working class; for the reasons described above, it does not generally take the form of means of production; and it is not exactly means of consumption for the capitalist class -- although perhaps that comes closest. Perhaps one of the problems in viewing this question from the standpoint of the reproduction schema is that a major sector is *presumed* when discussing military goods that has not analyzed at that level of abstraction where reproduction schemes are introduced. Namely, *The State*. In solidarity, Jerry
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