Paul C wrote in [OPE-L:3935]:
> The figures I gave are from real data
> taking into account the state, expenditure on advertising, banking etc,
> along with revaluations of capital stocks due to inflation. Britain
> had a relatively high ratio of unproductive to productive workers.
> It is just conceivable that in an economy with a lower proportion
> of unproductive workers and a comparably high rate of inflation, one
> could actually get a couple of years of negative surplus value, masked
> by apparent inflationary or speculative profits.
If one continues to maintain the proposition that unproductive workers
are paid out of surplus-value, then the continued existence of
unproductive labour (even at a reduced rate) would require that s > 0.
Don't your figures deal with what you call the "apparent rate of surplus
value"? In the wage/profit ratio, are the wages of unproductive labour
included in the wage or deducted from profit? Also, if one looks at the
wage/profit ratio for an individual firm, it might appear that s is
negative for some firms when in fact there is a redistribution of s among
firms. In any event, since s is the monetary expression of surplus labor
time, if there is no surplus labor time how can there be s?
In solidarity, Jerry