Re: AUT: Re: Immeasurable value

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Harry M. Cleaver wrote:

>I haven't read the debate on ficticious capital that you are refering to,
>but with respect to your last question I would say the following: the
>notion of fictitious capital requires the ability to make a quantitative
>comparison between the actual quantity of value and the quantity of value
>ostensibly represented by things like stocks and bonds. You have
>fictitious capital when the later exceeds the former as a result of
>phenomena such as speculation. If you give up quantity as Toni does with
>his assertion of the immeasurability of value then such a notion becomes
>unsustainable. If you are content to work only with money as value you
>could still do what some economists do, namely compare paper monetary
>values with estimated real asset values and you could designate any excess
>of the former over the later as amounting to "fictitious capital" - but of
>course you would be giving up everything Marxist theory helps us to see
>beyond/behind and within such surface categories.

I thought all paper assets were fictitious, in that they represent
claims on SV - or in monetary terms, claims on profits or interest -
unlike "real" capital, which actual workers actually work with. On p.
595 of the Vintage edition of Capital III, Marx says that fictitious
capital is created through the process of "capitalizing" an income
stream - e.g., a government bond, which is a claim to a series of
fixed interest payments.

Elsewhere in the volume, Marx implies that for stocks, what we would
call today the excess of market capitalization over underlying book
value (which is what Harry says here). But stocks are valuable only
insofar as they are claims to a stream of future profits, so in the
sense they are capitalized, even stock selling at or below book value
is "fictitious" in that sense.

Doug


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