Thomas Piketty

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Plucked this line from Harvey's review of Piketty, not having finished reading even that yet: “Money, land, real estate and plant and equipment that are not being used productively are not capital.”

Not having started Marx's, and not having plans for Piketty's, I am fascinated by capital in the overlap of its economic and philosophic capacities - as I'm sure many, if not all, of you are.

Maybe thirdform can help out here, or john.

Can we figure capital as the head of a growing stock? Something that only is as long as the stock is growing? Thus, removing your stock from any kind of circulation/reproduction would be, as it were, decapitating your stock, and issuing in a plateau-unto-decline. Once the head of an ale diminishes, the flattening commences (alongside its consumption).

So yeah, all capital is surplus stock, but not all surplus stock is capital?

How can we generalize, then, capitalism (as a set of beliefs/practices surrounding a reproductive use of stock) from its economic context? In what other manners can one be a capitalist?

As anathema as it is in my eyes, I do sense a profound capitalism in the way I go about learning. If there is not a perpetual increase/exercise of skills-of-abstraction, a sense of insufficiency sets in - the head dissipates.
 

vimothy

yurp
capital has multiple definitions depending on the context. one definition of capital, used by mainstream economists, is that it is a stock of previous output which contributes to current output. it's not surplus stock exactly, it's stock which has not been consumed which somehow increases the current level of output.
 

vimothy

yurp
piketty's point is that if the returns from owning this stock grown faster than income (r > g), in the limit capitalists end up owning everything
 

version

Well-known member
Thought this was a joke when I saw it pop up on Twitter, but it's genuine...

IC: Can you talk a little bit about the effect of Marx on your thinking and how you came to start reading him?
TP: Marx?
IC: Yeah.
TP: I never managed really to read it. I mean I don’t know if you’ve tried to read it. Have you tried?
IC: Some of his essays, but not the economics work.
TP: The Communist Manifesto of 1848 is a short and strong piece. Das Kapital, I think, is very difficult to read and for me it was not very influential.
IC: Because your book, obviously with the title, it seemed like you were tipping your hat to him in some ways.
TP: No not at all, not at all! The big difference is that my book is a book about the history of capital. In the books of Marx there’s no data.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Yeah it’s mad he’s not bothered to get to the long passages in Capital that are based on data from reports by the factories inspectorate and other sources.

He has a new book out I think about how we need socialism? I saw it in Housman’s yesterday.
 
Top