On Sat, 5 Jan 2008 23:47:48 [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED] Stefan Meretz wrote:
WC: Within capitalism we have M-C-M'
The really important sign here is the apostrophe ...
It indicates the entirely different dynamics
of pre-capitalist markets and capitalist markets.
Lets look a bit into it.
I never thought of it as an apostrophe. I always read that symbol as
belonging to some sort of nomenclature -- in my head, or reading out
loud I would say:
M goes to C goes to M prime
At one level of abstraction though, it´s just getting the maths
wrong, or rather an inability, or reluctance to move past an
approximate solution to a large set of simultaneous equations, the
likes of which marx wrote upon in capital, viz:
"20 yards of linen = 1 coat, or
20 Yards of linen are worth 1 coat."
In part one of capital, marx shows how money becomes the approximate
solution and then in part two, how the errors in the universal
equivalent, come home to haunt us as money transforms in to capital.
Wunt it just be lovely if we worked in a green field site and we
could bang all these equations in to a great big matrix and flip the
whole thing over with something like the simplex method rather than
having the solution tied to something as ergonomically catastrophic
as capital :)