Models

Basic goal is to facilitate modern understanding of Marx's "Capital" and related classics, updated to include adequate treatment of credit, world market, State etc.

Follow Marx's example in understanding bourgeois political economy better than they do to provide a more scientific understanding of crisis and revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism.

Use a modern Agent-Based Computational Economics approach, combined with econophysics and the sort of dynamics described in Burmeister "Capital Theory and Dynamics".

Start from models of the choreography of interactions between buyers, sellers, producers, consumers, workers, merchants, capitalists etc in the sort of micro detail Marx entered into. UML EDOC profile is intended to model detailed business interactions within large enterprises and across supply chains etc. Combine with SysML for the emergent macro concepts.

Initial goal is just to provide a simulation of the reproduction schemes with expanded reproduction re-invested in less labor intensive technology, but using emergent market prices from actual exchange of concrete products with wages regulated by productivity and unemployment as discussed in Unemployment and Revolution.

Hopefully it should be possible to provide endogenous money and crises (ie impossible to avoid them).

Minimal Version

Two "departments" each with single concrete use value out put. M for means of production, C for consumption.

Both have similar ranges of technologies eg for any positive integer N:

N**2 * M + 1* L --> ( N**2 + N) * M

eg 16 of M with 1 worker produces value added of 4M at end of period, while also reproducing the 16M input.

Usual marginal productivity stuff results in selection of appropriate N to maximize profits given wage. Wages rise with productivity.

"Optimal" path would have re-investment of half the output to increase output at maximum linear rate, other half consumed.

This implies zero capitalist consumption (breathtakingly used in Solow style models of optimal economic growth).

Actual capitalist consumption implies slower growth. Possibly even lower consumption of dynamic overaccumulation as well.

Should be able to do Frank Ramsey style increasing Gini coefficient with simple utility accumulation from consumption (and production) showing concentration into "thrifty" capitalists enjoying bliss and "improvident" workers on subsistence (ie zero net worth, but slowly increasing consumption).

Merchant Capital

Key point is that is necessary to model merchant capital as a "market maker" providing continuity of supply and liquidity with relatively small stocks of cash and commodities (3 commodities, M, C and L for labor power with unions as the merchant and unemployment as the stocks).

Each production period producers (eg of M or C) start with input stocks of M and L and can combine these using appropriate N to produce output stocks of M and C. Likewise consumers (the proportion of workers time not sold to producers and in their labor force stocks) have input stocks of C and add to their accumulated utility U according to a consumption function that values both consumption and leisure. Could also have either positive or negative enjoyment working on production of M and C.  Avoid unecessary distinction between production and consumption.

Between production periods there is a simultaneous exchange of outputs for inputs. Workers get wages and buy C, producers pay wages, interest and dividends and receive investment funds to repeat, contract or expand production. Capitalists also buy and sell shares and bonds in their portfolios. Merchants set prices.

Detailed elaboration is simultaneously an illustration of Marx's concepts, with a more modern flavour of capitalist portfolios and corporate producers and a design model for actual simulations.

Hopefully could be elaborated to include much more and become both a massively multi-player internet role playing game for education and propaganda and a more scientific model of crises than currently available.