Replacement Costs, Stocks and the Valuation of Inputs

This unpublished paper, written for distribution on the OPE-L list, seeks to clarify the conception of socially necessary labour time in Marx’s conception of value. It shows that this is not reducible to ‘replacement cost’ as simultaneist authors argue. Moreover that the implied conception of a compulsion upon capitalists to replace consumed inputs, along with attendant concepts such as a physical surplus product arising from replacement in kind, is alien to Marx’s thinking. The notion of replacement cost leads to obvious logical contradiction, and a full treatment must account properly for stocks of constant capital. This is an earlier version of the paper by the same name that was submitted to the 1995 conference of the Eastern Economic Associatio