On Feb 1, 2009, at 7:26 PM, James Heartfield wrote:
> But you don't need to be Marx to see that the financial sector can
> only survive if it can coexist with social reproduction. If you
> cannot eat, you cannot trade stock.
Of course. Who could say otherwise? Certainly not me.
> As to models, no, I think you are wrong. Marx calls the
> 'departments' in volume two a schema, not a model. (i.e. it is a
> rehearsal of the outer limits of the system, considering its
> variables). And he thinks of the occ and the frop as logical
> reconstructions derived from abstract laws of capitalist production.
> They are not models.
To me, a model is an abstraction, a simplification of a messy social reality, to help us think about it. When it comes to economics, it's usually expressed in mathematical language. I fail to see any significant difference between a schema and a model. All that business about SV and constant and variable capital looks very much like a model to me - a mathematized abstraction. No one ever touched variable capital in the real world.
Doug