From: Gerald Levy (glevy@LAGCC.CUNY.EDU)
Date: Mon Jan 14 2008 - 14:24:45 EST
Hi Michael P: > From the standpoint of the capitalists, they are > interested in profits, not surplus value. If the surplus at their disposal is not > used productively, profits will fall, creating problems for the capitalists. Individual capitalists know that if they don't have some amount of unproductive expenditures then their _individual_ rates of profit will _fall_. That is, they know that if they don't allocate some funds for the hiring of unproductive labor, then they will be at a competitive disadvantage. Of course, they don't look at these expenses as unproductive, they view them simply as costs of production and as such they have an incentive to reduce what they might see as 'unnecessary' costs but they still know that for competitive (and legal) reasons some of these expenditures are necessary. It is a different matter for capital as a whole. From an aggregate perspective, any unproductive expenditures of surplus value will limit the possible maximum rate of accumulation. Hence there is a micro/macro distinction to be made here: what is the case in the former can not be assumed to be the case in the latter and vice versa. But, is not that simple either because of international competition and trade. So, unproductive uses of surplus value what might benefit an individual economy and capitalists from that economy at the expense of the international economy and international capitalist economy as a whole. Whether capitalists benefit from the unproductive uses of surplus value by the state also has to be looked at from the perspective of the capitalist class as a whole _and_ different segments of that class ... _and_ that needs to be contextualized in terms of the international economy and the 'international affairs' of individual nation states. These are real conflicts. We need to understand the processes in their complexity and not fall into the fallacies of composition or division. In solidarity, Jerry
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