Re: [Marxism] "Factor intensity" question

[Matías Scaglione <mdscaglione@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Last brief comments to Julio:

1. You wrote:
"You may not have referred to "the arithmetic problems with the ratio
K/L," but I did.  And you replied to me.  Not me to you.".
Again, the main contention here is _conceptual_, not mathematical. My
point is that when you gave your interpretation of the ratio or relation
capital/labor, you should have warned that this interpretation is
meaningless from the perspective of good political economy (not even
from the perspective of Marxist political economy). As you did not
provide such clarification, I added a comment trying to warn the
participants of this list about the dangers of using the sloppy language
of economics.

2. Ratios and commensurability. Of course you can "build" ratios of any
sort, even conceptually meaningless. But for that you need
commensurability, as long as you are _comparing magnitudes_. This is not
the case, now turning to Marxist political economy, of capital (a social
relation) and human labor (ahistorical condition of production, Father
of material wealth, etc.).

3. The choice of the technical coefficients of production is but an
instance of the material process of production. Economics (i.e.
marginalism) is _only_ worried about this analytical moment, thus
transferring the analytical apparatus utilized to study exchange to the
analysis of the sphere of production and ignoring the substance of the
matter (i.e. human labor transforming nature and reproducing society
under definite  relations of production). Rule of thumb of economics:
_analytically, agents only choose, they do not produce_.  The market has
conquered the "anatomy of civil society".

4. "Capital intensity" and ideology. The sloppy and void-of-content term
"capital intensity" legitimizes decreasing relative wages (roughly, the
relation wages/profits).

Economists won't stop their hypostatizations. The critique of political
economy should give way to an urgent internal critique of economics. As
usual, its Achilles' heel  is the "decisive" sphere of production.

Matias

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