if people want to do accounts of the rate of surplus value, I say great. I have difficulty getting my head around algebraic formulations, and they require a good deal of subtitling. I think this stuff's important, but not what I do. that's at the general level.
but let's get more specific:
1. is anyone arguing that you can work out on a plane of numerical calculations the possibility of revolution, a kind of econometrics of the left? I don't think they are, but I'm prepared to be told otherwise, and will certainly take issue with this.
2. surplus value, like the law of value, etc, are all class struggle terms. insofar as the distinction between productive and unproductive activity/spending etc is related to the division between necessary and surplus labour, I'm interested - this to me would be the important index of class struggle.
3. the question then, if I've followed the thread, comes down to the mode of analysis and writing that is deemed important, or important for certain occasions. without a foregrounding of the categories of surplus value as political categories (as btw, I think Mattick does), the force of such works for us _in struggle_ is limited by its objectivistic cast in that it repeats the fetishistic bearing of the categories rather than showing where and how they are categories relating to and expressive of class struggles. but there is no reason to assume that this has to be the case, and certainly no reason to avoid the categories (such as surplus value, productive/unproductive, rate of surplus, etc) as central to an analysis insofar as it's recognised that they are categories of capitalism. they are not Marxian categories in the sense that they read capitalism from an archimedian point, outside of capitalism, they are an immanent critique of it. what stops them from being simply immanent is the refusal to eternalise and ontologise them. the risk involved in algebraic formulations is that very little or no time is spent insisting that they are not eternal, the categories appear like the inputs and outputs of a great abstract machine.
4. finally, and as a qualification of the above, writing and analysis shouldn't always be confined to the rhetorical. to the extent to which accounts of the rate of sv show me something about class struggles, of the character and composition of the working class, the strategies of capital accumulation, then they are invaluable. if they don't, then I'll have to read between the lines and translate.
P.S.. Rakesh. why don't prices (rather than the average rate of sv) feature in the decisions of individual firms to, eg, locate their operations in export processing zones? I guess this is another way of asking whether capitalists are the same thing as capital, and whether capitalists always act as capital should... maybe I've missed something, but doesn't it take credit to impose a kind of discipline on capitalists?
Angela --- rcollins at netlink.com.au