Abstract
Since the reswitching debate, the point has become familiar that the means of production in a capitalist society represent different ‘quantities of capital’, depending on the prevailing rate of profit. But, because these discussions have been about a critique of the neoclassical theory of value and distribution and not about a comprehensive new theory of capital, they have been conducted either in terms of circulating capital without machines or in terms of the production of one consumption good by means of one machine, with input prices assumed to be given, or with no physical inputs except labour (cf. Hicks, 1970; Nuti, 1970). Although von Neumann and Sraffa revived the ‘old classical idea’ (Sraffa) of treating what is left at the end of the year’s process of production as an economically different good2 from the one which entered the process, very few’ have tried to construct models where fixed capital goods are explicitly distinguished from other kinds of joint products.
The original English version of this essay was first circulated in 1974 as a mimeograph. The main mathematical results of parts t and it are based on the chapter on fixed capital in my thesis of 1971, a second edition of which is in preparation. Different sections of this essay have appeared and in part have been further developed in Schefold (1976a–c; 1978a, b).
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© 1980 Luigi L. Pasinetti
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Schefold, B. (1980). Fixed Capital as a Joint Product and the Analysis of Accumulation with Different Forms of Technical Progress. In: Pasinetti, L.L. (eds) Essays on the Theory of Joint Production. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05201-1_7
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