Andie writes
>
> 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"?
Yes
> 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.
No these examples do not. What Marx is talking about vis-a-vis "monopoly" is the ability of capitalist firms to capture a greater share of Total Surplus Value (TSV) not about the origins of that surplus value. Profits that come from investment in R&D in the Marxian frame are profits that owe their existence (ie the possibility of investing in R&D in the first place) to the ability to extract surplus value (the source of the original profits).
Travis