'Capital' is right, George is wrong

[Philip L Ferguson <plf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

George writes:
>Look Philip
>Once the factory is bought and is being used as a factory it is no longer
>a >commodity. It is capital in the form of fixed capital. It is no longer
>capital >in the form of a commodity.

George, *nothing* is a commodity after it has been sold and turned into
something else.  The point is that it is *produced as a commdity* and it's
value is *realised as a commodity*.

Imagine a thousand machines are produced as commodities.  Their total value
is a million dollars (including the surplus-value they contain) and they
are sold for this.

Other capitalists buy them for this million dollars, so they *then* become
part of the other capitalists' fixed capital.

Now, the measure of wealth embodied in all this is. . . yep, a million
dollars, and, yes, *it can be measured precisely in the thousand
commodities* (in this case machines) which have been produced!

Add up the value of all the commodities produced in a capitalist society
and you have a very good measure indeed of the wealth of that society.
What happens to the commodities subsequently is irrelevant, in value terms.
They are consumed and their values (which have already been realised
through their sale as commodities) are then used up, through the pizza
being eaten or the machine being used.

You seem to want to count the same value twice, however - you admit the
machines are originally commodities, but then you claim that their
subsequent existence as fixed capital is a *separate value*.  Presumably
you think the machines above are actually worth two million dollars - one
million when they're commodities, and a whole other million when they're
fixed capital.  Otherwise there is no way you could claim that the wealth
of capitalist society can't be measured in commodities.

Your bizarre concept of counting the same value twice would have given Marx
a good laugh.  It's the kind of flakey stuff that Marx tore strips off
bourgeois economists for believing 150 years ago.

Philip Ferguson