{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","uuid":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","normalized_title":"zombiecapitalismglobalcrisisandtherelevanceofmarx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","isbns":["9781608461042"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":426,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Zombie%20Capitalism%20Global%20Crisis%20and%20the%20Relevance%20of%20Marx","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/search"},"page":{"printed_page":46,"pdf_page":46,"physical_index":46,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"b5a7b418b8aaab13d4042dbd0fc3aa3cc8ed23eea843c997ce89964682a99814"},"chapter":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","content":"The relation between capitals cannot be understood as something fixed and unchanging. It is a dynamic process, based on the interaction through time of different capitals, so that the average \"socially necessary labour\" at any point is the result of individual processes of production organised independently of each other with different, often changing, amounts of concrete labour. The first capitalist to introduce a new technique in any section of industry will be able to produce goods with less than the amounts of labour prevailing in the system as a whole, and will be able to capture markets from others. But once other capitalists adopt the technique, this advantage is lost. Only a capitalist who controls a very large part of the market for particular commodities, or who can exert political pressure to impede others accessing his markets, will be able to get away for longer or shorter periods of time with charging prices which reflect amounts of labour higher than those that are socially necessary. The law of value only operates as the result of the pressures these different capitals exert on each other through time. Any still photograph from the moving film of capitalist development will always show discrepancies-and sometimes large ones-from the law of value. But the film itself will show the discrepancies eventually disappearing under the pressure of inter-capitalist competition even as other discrepancies arise.\n\nValue and prices\n\nIt is this dynamic aspect to Marx's theory that enables it to deal with a problem that beset the attempts by Smith and Ricardo to base value on labour. This is that the ratio of labour to investment varies from industry to industry. Yet in practice the rate of profit (the ratio of the surplus value to investment) does not vary in the same way, even when wages are more or less the same level and the rate of exploitation must be about the same. The prices of goods seem to depend not on the amount of socially necessary labour needed to produce them, but on a mark up on the cost of capital investment. The bigger the capital investment the bigger, it seems, is the mark up. A capitalist selling something produced by one person working on an expensive machine will expect a bigger mark up than for something produced by one person working on a cheap machine. The fact that some industries are more \"capital intensive\" than others implies that prices have to diverge from values in terms of labour if profitability is not to be much lower in some cases than others.\n\n46\n\nUnderstanding the System: Marx and Beyond","previous_page":45,"next_page":47}