What accumulation is depends on which dialectical thread you follow in your explanation of capitalism. Sometimes one moment, or one form, of the capital is accumulated, sometimes another. Sometimes it is in the form of capital goods, sometimes it is in a particular exploitative moment, someplaces it is immiseration, sometimes ecological destruction, someplaces overflowing warehouses, sometimes the money form, someplaces devastated public health, sometimes scientific knowledge, someplaces built infrastructures, someplaces it is political power, sometimes it is acclerating aesthetic innovation... but that doesn't help you come up with a universal quantitative measurement tool or equation, the kind asociological and undialectical economists like.
Your questions keep seeking singular quantifiable answers, so that the discrete answers can generate formulae... they are the wrong questions for Marx. I'm not quantophobic, quantitative analysis is very important. But this whole project appears to be driven by a search for reifiable categories, stable meanings, and equations all but universally applicable. The search is for an impoverished understanding of Marx. This is how Bertell Ollman started 1971's book, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society.
*I **WITH WORDS THAT APPEAR LIKE BATS *
* *
The most formidable hurdle facing all readers of Marx is his 'peculiar' use of words. Vilfredo Pareto provides us with the classic statement of this problem when he asserts that Marx's words are like bats: one can see in them both birds and mice. No more profound observation has ever been offered on our subject. Thinkers through the years have noticed how hard it is to pin Marx down to particular meanings, and have generally treated their non-comprehension as a criticism. Yet, without a firm knowledge of what Marx is trying to convey with his terms, one cannot properly grasp any of his theories.
How, for example, are we to understand the startling claim that 'Value is labor' (my emphasis), or Marx's assertion that the 'identity of consumption and production. . .appears to be a threefold one', or his allusion to theory which under certain circumstances becomes a 'material force'? Marx's statements frequently jar us, and instances of obscurity in his work, occasions where two or more interpretations seem equally applicable, are more numerous still.
The rest is worth reading and quite on point.
On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 1:43 PM, D. T. Cochrane <dtc at yorku.ca> wrote:
> Let's get back to the original point.
>
> N&B claim that many concepts that political economists take for granted are
> meaningless without their value theories. Then, they argue that the
> prevailing value theories are both epistemologically flawed and, more
> seriously, ontologically impossible. The response have largely taken two
> prongs - mere dismissal notwithstanding. One of the responses is that Marx
> (or Marxists) either do not have or do not need a labour theory of value.
>
> If that is so, what is the meaning of 'accumulation'? What precisely is
> 'accumulated'? How is it to be measured? What is the meaning of production?
> How do we measure productivity? How do we identify productive and/or
> unproductive labour? What is the relationship between production and
> financial values? What is capital?
>
>