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Dick was the SWP's top economist in the 1960s and 70s until he joined the throngs fleeing the cult. He was strongly influenced by Ernest Mandel. Unlike me, he sort of retired from politics after leaving the party (which was generally the case for most ex-members) but this comment on FB shows that he hasn't lost the thread:
It's the best review I've seen so far and brings out critical points, not least of which is that Piketty hasn't read Marx and doesn't understand Marx's analysis . Further Harvey's point is critical that Piketty's definition of capital confuses wealth -- the result, as Marx explained, of the accumulation of surplus product not invested in production -- with capital, which is invested in production. InPiketty the two are artificially added together. But it is only, as capital is continually invested in in production and successfully 'valorized' in whatever markets prove most profitable, so that a portion can be reinvested, does the economy expand. It has practically nothing to do with the wealth of owners. What is still left out of Harvey's review and certainly isn't present in Piketty, is that in the competition to grab ever larger portions of markets capital attempts to reduce costs through making more goods more cheaply. Although this certainly includes outsourcing abroad, and the continuous driving down wages down of wages and marginalization of workers at home, it also demands technological advance. Without computerization, globalization would not have been or could be, today, possible. This as Marx stressed drives down the per-product profit rate because less living labor is employed in the manufacture of each product as capital is forced to purchase more costly equipment. Selling more goods is not only externally driven by competition; it's internally driven by the tendency of profit rates to fall. In 2008, despite reams of books claiming the contrary, the fundamental cause of the crisis was not the greed of bankers and Wall Street, nothing new there, Cornelius Vanderbilt invented derivatives in the 1870s to sell worthies railroads, the fundamental cause, to repeat, was the overproduction of real estate. In the end of every cycle, as Marx also emphasized in that notoriously unread second volume, a frenzy of debt is extended to keep up the valorization process and to disguise the end of the cycle. Thus, as Marx pointed out, every crisis appears to be a financial crisis when, in fact, it is a crisis precipitated by overproduction.
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