From: Jerry Levy (jerry_levy@VERIZON.NET)
Date: Thu Jan 10 2008 - 14:27:00 EST
A firm running a whiskey bond is in a similar situation. They buy
barrels of raw spirit and store them for 7 years to mature, but at
any point they could sell the barrels at a higher price than they
bought them.
Hi Paul C:
This is a different type of situation. Here, you have to look at
both the expenditure of labor involved in storage and the contribution of nature to its use-value. There is also a rent affect.
In any event, when looking for references to refresh my memory
on the above, I came across a very interesting passage from
Volume III of _Capital_, Part 5, Ch. 24, which concerns wine but
could apply equally well to whiskey:
[page 517 in Penguin/Vintage ed.; p. 462 in Kerr ed.]
From Penguin ed. in para that begins "In interest-bearing capital,
the movement of capital is abbreviated" there is the following:
* "Capital is now a thing, but the thing is capital". (Kerr edition: "Capital is then a thing, which is of itself capital").
By which he means that wine in the cellar becomes *commodity-capital*, a thing?
* "The money's body is now by love possessed". (In the Kerr edition, this is translated as "The money is then pregnant").
This, according to the Penguin edition, is a reference to Goethe's _Fauste_, Part 1, but I'm not familar enough with Goethe to catch the literary reference. Does he mean that the wine is a a commodity in the process of becoming, i.e. in process of formation and transition, like a fetus in the womb?
A rather romantisized 19th Century understanding of pregnancy ("body is by now love possessed"), perhaps.
* later in the same paragraph, there is: "all capital is money capital in its value expression".
Doesn't this suggest a support a non-dualist perspective?
In solidarity, Jerry
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