RE: FROP, Les Schaffer

[Charles Brown <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> dlawbailey@xxxxxxxxxxx 01/09/02 07:53AM >>>


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        Charles Brown asks:

"What is the source of the profit in your equations ?


        As far as I can see the source of profit is the capitalist buying his
supplies in one market and selling his product into another.  It is the
classic source of profit: inequality of information and liquidity.


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CB: So, the source of her profit is the capitalist who sells her the supplies
? And where does that supplying capitalist get that source of profit from ?

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        Labor is an illiquid commodity and money is liquid.  Capitalists know 
the
conditions of credit and the marketplace while workers only know their own
needs.

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CB: Isn't the relationship between the workers and the capitalists in the 
marketplace ?

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        On 1/8 I continued:

        Now the owners replace the lone operating engineer with a new computer
program (not even a new computer, mind you, just a program).  The "surplus
value" from "living labor" just went to zero.  Does the profit go instantly
to zero?  Does it become infinite?  We have inarguably reduced this
fundamentalist Marxian variable to zero and yet nothing looks all that
different to me from the capitalist's perspective.

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  Charles Brown asks: "Who will buy whatever the capitalist is selling ? The
Red Dwarf and the program don't have any money. There's a break in the fit
between supply and demand."

        Indeed there is and the natural state of capitalism in deflation due to
accumulation of money-capital, not "surplus labor".  However capitalists
re-allocate money to new capitals (and the workers who operate those
capitals)through credit.

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CB: Aren't there robots and bionic machines, Red Dwarfs and programs, and not
workers, operating those capitals, just like the Red Dwarf and the program run
the first capital you posited in a fully automated factory with no human
workers ? Isn't this capital's production process fully automated , like in a
science fiction novel , with perpetual motion machines, _2001:Space
Odessey_-Hal model computers, Capek's "Rossum's Universal Robots"
 and the like ?

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 This effectively increases the size of the pool of
money-capital without harming the rich.  The system works so long as the
rich get more and more efficient at spreading their money to new
technologies.  Decrease the tendency to create credit or undermine the
quality of that credit and you have a contraction, just as we see today.



        Thought experiments test theories for absurdities.






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