>> If you use any form of industrially
>>produced transportation, you contribute towards someone's profit. So
>>while it is true that the trip to Granma's is not productive of real
>>values, it does usually consume real value, thus it makes someone
>>(the big bad wolf?) a profit.
>
>Production only equals profit in a capitalist universe of discourse.
Isn't that what I just said? The thing is that different people are talking about different things. Some are talking about profitable exertion and some are talking about what productive exertion. These are, as you point out, different things.
> In
>an anti-capitalist discourse (e.g. marxist) profit is only an
>appropriation of a part of the value produced by another. That
>appropriation is itself not productive labour. As someone here noted
>there are whole professions whose sole business is shuffling around bits
>of this surplus to people who have claims on it. They are not at all
>involved in producing it. And this is even before we start talking about
>fictitious capital, those titles to wealth that have no connection to
>value as such, for example the trillions worth of US paper that is
>currently held as 'fiat money' by foreign governments. Once you start to
>equate profit with production you are deep into the typically capitalist
>mode of abstraction.
Agreed. stop it.
At 12:53 PM -0800 12/2/08, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>Now, some activities involve rent-taking. Receiving
>rent from land ownership is the central example.
>Monopolistic profits due to unique control over a
>resource or technology -- Marx's example in CIII is a
>someone who derives income from a mill that runs on a
>waterfall. One might also think of people who get
>income from patents and copyrights, same thing
Here's an example of the confusion of terms. Not the same thing really, The water mill didn't just grow out of the waterfall and get found by a wandering capitalist. It was built, stone by stone, by workers who were paid by one or more capitalists. Its a long term investment, rent is merely the the sale price of a commodity, paid by installments. The difference between a product sold on an installment plan and one sold for cash is trifling, something those people who babble about "rentiers" being a different class to other capitalists (or not capitalists at all) can't seem to grasp.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas