> The issue is not to start from Marx (or
> even individual Marxists) and find out their mistakes. We begin in this
> case from *data*, which is falsely presented to us as fact.
I agree with Alan there, and with many subsequent points.
Alan writes:
Critique is not the same as criticise... "because the accountants have
been brought by their task into sufficient contact with the realities of a
market economy, they have been forced to
> provide categories from which the value-concept can be recovered"
>
I take it that Alan means that we don't dismiss the data as rubbish, but
acknowledge it does measure something, and try to do something different
with it. I have been all for that idea, and I did research on that basis
already in New Zealand on the SNA accounts in 1987-90, whatever their
limitations happened to be (the Dutch accounts look to be much better
actually, in terms of the detailed information you can get out of them).
But I am still querying such strategems as (1) including expenditures on
unproductive labour in surplus-value, which would mean inter alia that when
the mass of unproductive labour engaged increases, then the rate of surplus
value (and profitability) increases purely as a result of that, and (2)
excluding the annual domestic net interest received by the banks, which I
think ought to be defined as an appropriation of newly-created
surplus-value, and as part of the cost-structure of commodity production.
Regards
Jurriaan