The point is that you are misplacing your concreteness. The underlying essence of capital is not socially necessary abstract labor. It is cold, hard, sweaty, and all-too-real labor.
But, of course, if that's true -- poof, there goes your paper!
> -----Original Message-----
> From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
> On Behalf Of Jonathan Nitzan
> Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 2004 1:05 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] New Imperialism or New Capitalism?
>
> Sure, Marx saw capital accumulation as a transformation from money to
> commodities to more money. But the underlying unit in which this
> transformation was measured was abstract labor, a unit that no one has
> ever seen and that is logically impossible. Although Marx understood the
> process of financial capitalization better than most, he also believed
> that, in the final analysis, this process oscillated around the path
> charted by the the production of surplus value. This is where we get the
> notion that finance can get "delinked" from production -- but then how
> can you get delinked from a quantum you do not and cannot know?
>
> Charles Brown wrote:
>
> > What about the fact that in Vol. II of _Capital_, Marx characterizes
> > capitalist accumulation as accumulation of money,i.e. finances, not
> > capital - M-C-M', not C-M-C' ? Not ownership of variable and
> > constant capital in the form of control of material activity in the
> > form of labor power expressed or means of production, but of filthy
> > lucre ?
> >
> >
> > CB
> >
> >------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
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