Re: 'Capital' is right; George is wrong

[Hinrich Kuhls <kls@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 14:50 12.03.00 +0900, Philip L Ferguson wrote in reply to George P:

>>To elaborate: The point is that the wealth of capitalist society does not
>>present >itself "as an immense accumulation of commodities." Much of the
>>wealth of capitalist >society is in the form of factories. Factories are
>>forms of capital but not >commodities. The factories are a form of fixed
>>capital. Fixed capital is not a >commodity form.
>
>Wrong.  A factory is a form of capital (fixed capital) *for capitalist B
>who buys it*.  But a factory first has to be built by a construction
>company, capitalist A.  It is built by said construction company for the
>market and sold - ie it is produced as a commodity.  Other fixed capital
>within the factory - the machines - is also originally produced as
>commodities, by capitalist C, the capitalist who owns the machine-making
>firms.

Marx:

"But the fact that some instruments of labor are localised, attached to the
soil by their roots, assigns this portion of fixed capital a peculiar role
in the economy of nations. They cannot be sent abroad, cannot circulate as
commodities in the world- market. Title to this fixed capital may change,
it may be bought and sold, and this extent may circulate ideally. These
titles of ownership may even circulate in foreign markets, for instance in
the form of stocks. But a change of the persons owning this class of fixed
capital does not alter the relation of the immovable, materially fixed part
of the national wealth to its movable part."

[Capital, Volume 2, Chapter "Fixed capital and circulating capital"]

>(...)
>The variable capital is that spent on labour-power, and labour-power in
>capitalist society is. . . you guessed it, a commodity!

Brief, but too brief again. Marx:

"The exchange between capital and labour at first presents itself to the
mind in the same guise as the buying and selling of all other commodities.
... That this same labour is, on the other hand, the universal
value-creating element, and thus possesses a property by which it differs
from all other commodities, is beyond the cognisance of the ordinary mind."

[Capital, Volume 1, Chapter "The transformation of the value (and
respectively the price) of labour-power into wages]

>(...)

Philip in concluding his post:

>George, your attempts to 'correct' Marx only reveal how little you and your
>'Communist Think Tank' understand about capital and capitalism.

HK