[was: Re: [PEN-L:13844] Re: Re: Current implications for South Africa]
Doug Pangloss writes:
>may I point out one thing you didn't include - human ingenuity, and its
>specifically capitalist form of innovation in pursuit of profit. You list
>every problem and treat each as a potentially fatal constraint. As the Old
>Man put it in the Grundrisse:
>
>"Those economists who, like Ricardo, conceived production as directly
>identical with the self-realization of capital -- and hence were heedless
>of the barriers to consumption or of the existing barriers of circulation
>itself, to the extent that it must represent counter-values at all points,
>having in view only the development of the forces of production and the,
>growth of the industrial population -- supply without regard to demand --
>have therefore grasped the positive essence of capital more correctly and
>deeply than those who, like Sismondi, emphasized the barriers of
>consumption and of the available circle of counter-values, although the
>latter has better grasped the limited nature of production based on
>capital, its negative one-sidedness. The former more its universal
>tendency, the latter its particular restrictedness."
The way I read this -- and similar -- passages is that Sismondi and similar
underconsumption-oriented thinkers (e.g., Baran & Sweezy) miss the
expansionary nature of capitalism and end up with an inaccurate picture
(stagnationism). Ricardo was equally one-sided, seeing only the
expansionary nature of capitalism. Above and elsewhere in his work, Marx
emphasizes the latter.
But as Marx knew well, Ricardo posited his own barriers to capitalism's
expansionism, on the supply side, imposed by nature (akin to that eternal
chestnut, the "we're running out of oil" theory), which lead to the dreaded
stationary state, the supply-side version of stagnationism. But Marx didn't
accept Nature as the barrier that sinks capitalism. Instead, capitalism
produced its own internal barriers to its expansion.
The problem with Doug's using the quote above is that Marx presented his
own vision (so he can't simply quote Marx to knock down theories of
capitalism's destruction): the expansionary drive of capitalism not only
jumps over the supply-side and demand-side barriers -- but ends up in
crisis as a result, creating barriers to its own further expansion. This is
Marx's over-accumulation theory: he posited that capitalism grows too much,
even by its own standards, so that the rate of profit falls. The
capitalists foul their own nest!
Unfortunately for Marx, his volume III theory of the rising organic
composition of capital doesn't work very well on either a theoretical or a
practical level. Not only can the capitalists compensate for any rise in
the organic composition of capital by cutting wages relative to
productivity (raising the rate of surplus-value), but any crisis that
occurs purges imbalances from the system, destroying capital and allowing
accumulation to recover -- to drive itself into crisis once again. This is
a cyclical theory, even though the down phases may be extremely long and
disgusting and even violent. The same thing can can said for more
sophisticated crisis theories of the Marxian tradition (like the one I
developed).
I think that if we want to develop a better theory of over-accumulation,
it's good to look to Engels, who referred to the contradiction between
individual appropriation and social production (in his SOCIALISM: UTOPIAN
AND SCIENTIFIC). Individual "human ingenuity, and its specifically
capitalist form of innovation in pursuit of profit" is not done in the
light of the societal limits and the need for balance between sectors. That
is, in the language of modern economics, it ignores external costs and
benefits (of both the technical and pecuniary varieties) except to make an
effort to dump internal costs on others while capturing external benefits.
This leads to environmental problems (not simply due to nature's limits but
due to capitalists' active efforts to get something for nothing at its
expense, as with the case of over-fishing). It also leads to recessions (as
when capitalists deal with a small decline in profits by laying off
thousands, shifting the costs to others but undermining the demand for
consumer goods and hurting profitability more -- a clear case of a
pecuniary externality).
Even this doesn't inevitably lead to capitalism's demise. Instead, it
encourages collective solutions, i.e., the monopolization of markets and
the rise in the role of the state. The last time capitalism had a gigantic
Crisis -- the 1930s -- it encouraged the rise of state solutions, from
social democracy to fascism, with the U.S. New Deal in the middle, on a
national level. The next Crisis will likely see its solution on the global
level, as seen in embryonic form in the Kyoto accords. (Somehow, the
Bushwackers aren't anti-abortion on _this_ issue.) If the current US
slowdown turns into a global depression, it encourages further development
of collective control, perhaps the creation of a global Fed. "Human
ingenuity" would show up in the form of a New Bretton Woods conference, a
global-statist version of social democracy or fascism or something
in-between. This eventually would allow the re-establishment of capitalist
accumulation ....
Yoshie is right: it's the other dimension of Engels' posited contradiction
that is crucial: capitalism won't go away until people destroy it and
replace it with a system which (unlike the actually-existed socialisms of
yore) prevents the re-emergence of capitalism. The Marxian hope has always
been that the many failures of capitalism -- and our propaganda -- will
encourage people to form such a movement. But there's nothing inevitable
about it.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
