From: Paul Cockshott (wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK)
Date: Fri Apr 22 2005 - 11:25:29 EDT
Andy Sorry I'm going to have to duck out of the detailed discussion needed on this one. So in (probably unhelpful) 'sound-bite' form the main problem appears to be that your (5) presupposes capitalist firms, hence capitalism, survives, hence that profits exist. Hence it appears to presuppose what the argument 1-5 is intended to explain. Paul ---- The real problem to my mind is not explaining surplus value - that drops directly from the matrix formulation of production by von Neumann and Leontief. The real problem is explaining how this comes to have a monetary representation - where does the money come from. If we assume a capitalist economy growing at some fraction of its von Neumann growth rate then the aggregate circuit m-c-m'-c'-m''-c''-m''' implies an exponential growth in m. However we know that during the 19th century the average growth of world gold stock was under 1% per year - see the accompanying table that gives growth of stock in million troy ounces. This would appear to set a maximum rate of profit of under 1% per annum in the 19th century under the gold standard. How did the process m-c-m' occur given these constraints.
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