Replying rather than editing on extra to my comment but- very simplified (and with the disclaimer that I'm no scholar and I'm literally typing on my phone):

Capital =/= production or the real economy.

Capital =/= value (though it is a unit meant to approximate value and transfer it)

Imagine if the US creates a missile. Let's say the production cost and valuation is... Uh, 100$usd. Let's say that Russia produces the exact same missile, functionally and materially identical (though in reality Russian missiles are better than western crap because of capitalization, lol). It's valuation and production cost is.. 25$usd.

What is the difference, exactly? What is the 75$ difference? As a really shitty and lazy and probably somewhat flawed simplification- this is the "capital," the "capitalization" you're talking about.

This is how you get wonderful capitalistic... Capitalizations, like say, the US army spending over 36$k per garbage bin (look it up... Lmao). This is how you get the world's most expensive and certainly the least cost-efficient healthcare system on the planet (and probably in all of history). This is how regurgitated capital ("capitalizations" or "financialization," if you will) in the form of money lending, then interest paid to service the loan, and so on and so forth- metaphorical circlejerks of debt and transactions ("services") the-more-you-know get measured as """productive economic activity.""" agony-mescaline

Anyways yeah, that's about it (heavily and shittily simplified). Once again I heavily recommend looking up prof. Michael Hudson, prof. Richard Wolff, and the Geopolitical Economy Report.

[–] BashfulBob@hexbear.net 1 points 1 month ago

Capital =/= production or the real economy.

I think someone else referred to this definition before. But

"Capital (goods)" = "those durable produced goods that are in turn used as productive inputs for further production"

What is the difference, exactly? What is the 75$ difference? As a really shitty and lazy and probably somewhat flawed simplification- this is the "capital," the "capitalization" you're talking about.

No, that's the marginal cost.

What's more, a Marxist "all else equal" analysis would say the $75 difference in cost is ultimately a labor cost + profit. One big reason why Russia can build artillery cheaper than the US is simply due to its limited number of middle men between raw materials and deployed weapon.

That inflates the raw labor cost (the US MIC procurement system is a jobs program that rewards inefficiency) and extracts an admin fee at every step.

But that price differential isn't capital. It's cost.

Am example of capital would be the mineral gathering operation used to create explosives. Another would be the machinery to create the bomb housing. Another would be the training school for the engineers who assemble the bombs.