From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Thu Nov 30 2006 - 11:32:07 EST
Paul Z wrote: >Rakesh, We are so far apart I wouldn't no where to start. Ok but I don't think my emphasis on luxury spending as motivation is neoclassical, and describes a feudal situation. To be sure, even to perpetuate their present luxury fund capitalists have to maintain a viable on going enterprise, upkeep of which will force technological innovation and accumulation. Investing in the enterprise holds out the promise of a larger luxury fund in the future even if prevents an immediate increase in the luxury fund. Yet the maintaining of the enterprise won't likely come at the expense of luxury consumption. If it did, the capitalists would simply divest. That's what seems likely to me. Now you seem to be saying that capitalists virtuously drive in small cars so as to control as much surplus value as possible! I think you're bending the stick too far in the other direction. Let's not forget that capitalists may hide their luxury spending when they are using public handouts to supplement the wages they pay (this is of course what Wal Mart has done). But I wouldn't make too much of this propaganda stunt. Capitalists reinvest much of their gross receipts so they can perpetuate and even increase their own consumption fund for luxury spending even if they hide or defer their expenditures. Jain merchants were famous for this. And most often they do not hide them. Think here the Gilded Age and Reagan's Second Gilded Age. Yachts, mansions, expensive cars, summer homes, mistresses, jewelry, professional sports teams, art collections, wine cellars, endowments, vacations, exotica. etc. Consumption is conspicuous, competitive or positional and extravagant. It's what motivates the accumulation of capital; even if competitively imposed the accumulation of capital cannot go so far as to reduce luxury spending. Indeed for the most part the accumulation of capital prevents expenditures on luxuries all at once only to increase in absolute terms the fund available for luxuries in the future (though this can change). . Well we'll need a lot of sociological evidence to settle this debate. I am obviously worried here that we are giving too flattering portrait to the capitalist as a socially useful ascetic; I am suggesting that the role capitalism gives him to play is not as socially respectable as you seem to be saying. Also, what happens if the capitalization of surplus value yields less surplus value in absolute terms than yielded in the previous round of production? Here the accumulation of capital is contrary to the production of as much surplus value as possible. It seems to me that accumulation would cease. For this reason it seems inaccurate to define capitalism as an imperative for accumulation or to equate that imperative with the maximal production of surplus value. Rakesh > The founder of >Walmart empire-built. In fact somewhere I heard that he drove around in a >relatively old car. > >The object of capital is to control as much surplus value as possible. >His/her personal choice thereafter regarding how much to use for luxury >consumption is just that, but a capitalist who likes luxury consumption too >much is violating his/her social function and that is NOT virtue. That's >in Marx, but I don't feel like finding the exact passage in 'Conversion of >Surplus Value into Capital'. > >Paul > >--On Wednesday, November 29, 2006 2:10 PM -0800 Rakesh Bhandari ><bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU> wrote: > >>We also know that the capitalist will not accumulate if >>it means that he must forgo luxury consumption as such. He may of >>course restrain from overindulgence in order to make investments to >>maintain over time a luxury fund or even to increase of the fund. But >>the imperative of accumulation won't be allowed to diminish his fund >>for luxury consumption in real terms over time.... > > >************************************************************************** >THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF 9-11-2001 --"a benchmark in 9/11 research", review >Volume 23 (2006), RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY, P.Zarembka, ed., Elsevier >*********************** http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka
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