Actually I don't know whether Michael and I disagree. I was just asking about corporate "abstinence" -- is it silly to treat the examples I gave as a sort of "abstinence"?
But whether or not it is, surely some corporate profits come from investment in R&D, plant and equipment, collateralizable assets and the like. Just as other corporate profits come from the monopoly positions that some corporations have. (Marx's example in the chapter on Differential Rent in CIII is the waterwheel.) These erxamples show that there are other cources of profits than exploitation. So the LTV or the LV is not strictly true either empirically nor a perfect analytical framework if it is an a priori assumption.
However, and here Michael and I agree, it's highly plausible that for almost all corporations or capitalist firm, the exploitation if labor is the only long term reliable source of profit. The others cancel out on the average if not in the individual case. (They may over time in the individual case.) But as long as a capitalist firm can squeeze labor out of its workers and sell waht they produce with something left over, it will make profit even if it is only as "abstinent" as a average. Or less so, if it can squeeze enough.
--- Michael Perelman <michael at ecst.csuchico.edu>
wrote:
> Justin and I have very different interpretations
> about this subject. First of all, modern
> capital owes less to the abstinence of small
> primitive farmers than to the primitive
> accumulation by which people who worked the land
> were dispossessed.
>
> Once the system is set in motion, a corporation
> might well put aside some funds for
> research and development, more likely it will tap
> public sources of research. If the
> corporation does set aside some funds for
> investment, it does so because it exists within a
> social structure that allows it to obtain a profit
> on its investment.
>
> If we see the corporation as an individual agent,
> acting alone, we can construct a story
> along Justin's line that the corporation reaps a
> profit from its abstinence.
> Alternatively, we can see the corporation existing
> within a complex social network of
> production in which it is able to leverage its
> "abstinence" in order to extract a profit
> from the work of others.
>
> John Roemer's work, to which Justin referred, is
> mathematically solid. It sets up one
> particular framework. Marx sets up another.
>
> These different frameworks are not either right or
> wrong. You set up a framework in order
> to analyze the world in the best way you know how
> giving your perspective.
>
> Brad is certainly intelligent enough to understand
> that these frameworks are not something
> that you can disprove. You can set up an energy
> theory of value in order to understand
> certain problems; to do so as not refute Marxist
> theory or neoclassical theory.
>
>
>
> --
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
>
> Tel. 530-898-5321
> E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
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