Tom writes:
>.... Although the "total working day" may be hard to quantify, it has
>qualitative limits, depending upon definite technical, historical and
>physiological factors. At some unspecifiable (and malleable) point,
>increasing the length of the working day won't do any more good because it
>reduces the productivity of labour below the prevailing average.
>Similarly, at some unspecifiable point, intensifying the productivity of
>labour won't do any good because it will devalorize a greater quantity of
>existing capital than it will produce new surplus-value. Fictitious values
>allow capital to exceed (on paper) these qualtitative barriers to
>accumulation -- for a while, but only for a while.
I think about the key point here as follows: the total amount of profits +
interest + rent in society is constrained by the total amount of
surplus-value that workers produce. However, the total amount of profits +
interest + rent _promised_ or _expected_ is not constrained in this way, so
we can see all sorts of craziness.
Even for an individual industry, does anyone ever add up all of the profit
predictions/promises/expectations and consider the extent to which one
company's profits cancel out another's? This is different from the recent
political duopoly competition in the US, where the candidates' promises
were quantified and found not to add up in terms of budget balance (or at
least so it was claimed).
> >Since the "market for fictitious human capital" isn't as important as the
> >stock market for the day-to-day functioning of capitalism, I don't read it
> >this way. However, if credentialed workers get enough in the way of broken
> >promises, they might unionize or similar. Here in the US, they sue.
>
>I think this gets to the heart of what I'm asking. Is the stock market
>_really_ more important for the day-to-day functioning of capitalism or is
>it simply so much easier to quantify and index?
The stock market is not as important as it's implied to be by all the news
coverage it gets.[*] But there can be wealth effects and expectations
effects (I repeat myself) of big fluctuations of the SM, as in the
aftermath of 1929. Of course, as I argue in my 1994 paper
(http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine/depr/D0.html), the Crash was only a
trigger that set off an already implosive situation. This one event, of
course, was burned into the historical memory and helps explain why people
are so fascinated by the SM.
[*] I think that no commercial news outlet wants to start downplaying the
stock market, because they'd lose an audience to all the others who don't
do so. If all of them started doing so, however, probably no one would miss
it. After all, the people who really care about the SM get all their news
from the Internet, directly.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
"From the east side of Chicago/ to the down side of L.A.
There's no place that he gods/ We don't bow down to him and pray.
Yeah we follow him to the slaughter / We go through the fire and ash.
Cause he's the doll inside our dollars / Our Lord and Savior Jesus Cash
(chorus): Ah we blow him up -- inflated / and we let him down -- depressed
We play with him forever -- he's our doll / and we love him best."
-- Terry Allen.
