Justin wrote: >I just think that you can explain >>some profits by normal bourgeois means (buying low and selling high) or >>monopoly advantages, as in MArx's discussion of differential rent--which >>leads me to thing that even he doesn't accept thestrict version of the LTV, >but only uses it as an idealization....so you have profit that is >generated by possession of monoply advantages that does not >represent value in Marx's sense. Note that this profit is not a >result of redistribution of SV, a point that can be made if we >imagine a situation with two capitalists, one of whom acquires a >monopoly and behaves as monopolists due. His monopoly rent is not >redistribute from the other guy, it's due rather to his possession >of the monopoly (Marx's point): so, profits without value that are >therefore NOT due to the expoloitation of labor--rather to the >exploitation of consumers....
A monopolist is able to get an above-average rate of return on its capital. Nonmonopolists (except, perhaps, in Lake Woebegone..) must therefore receive a below-average return on their capital. The economic process determining these different returns to different capitals is a process of distributing the value of the total surplus product among the various claimants to that surplus value. Marx's "Law Of Value" applies to the aggregate surplus as produced. Because Marx defined "value" as a determinate quantity of labor time and "capital" as *capitalized* surplus value he was able to view the capitalist system as a dynamic entity subject to quantitatively determined "laws of motion" such as the "Law of the Falling Tendency of the Rate of Profit" which has been shown both to be empirically true and to be a strict consequence of the fundamental social relationships defining a capitalist economic system. Shane Mage "When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even downright silly. When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true." (N. Weiner)
