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Shalva wrote: >Ha! More machines yet longer hours (more relative AND absolute value)? Yes, indeed. Interestingly, in NZ, capitalists for the past 25 years have relied extensively on trying to expand absolute surplus-value. NZ workers now work more hours than at any time in the past century. There's also a fair bit of speed-up which has the benefit of increasing the commodities produced *without* lessening the value contained in each one. >What does that mean for the "tendency of the organic composition to rise"...? It's a way capitalists try to get round the fact that becoming more productive by increasing the organic composition of capital depresses the rate of profit. Ultimately, because they have to compete with each other, they have to raise the organic composition. But, certainly individual capitals can rely on more and more absolute surplus-value until the workers just can't work any longer and harder. >Also what should we make of the tendency of multinationals to eschew automation in favor of exploiting the massive reserve armies of cheap/unfree labor in the periphery? Isn't that a function of the increase in capital-saving (as opposed to labor-saving) technology; i.e. the containerization/logistics revolution? I'm thinking of John Smith's work on "value captured" production chains... Both monopolies and multinationals - and, of course, some of them are both - are ways in which capital tries to escape from its own contradictions and the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Marx was already seeing the beginnings of this at the end of his life. Some of his insights in vol 3 are extraordinary. He didn't foresee imperialism but he foresaw that capital was driven to try to escape its own laws of motion, and that is basically what imperialism is about. It's interesting you mention the multinationals' eschewing automation in favour of the exploitation of masses of cheap labour. Capitalist ideologues, including of the economic variety, used to claim that capitalism could fully automise and pooh-pooh Marxist critics. We would soon be living in a leisure society, they claimed back in the 1960s at the height of the long postwar boom. How pathetic that turned out to be. Capital simply cannot automate everything; only a society in which the law of value had been overthrown could do that and produce a true leisure society. While workers in the First World have seen working conditions drastically undermined - the 'precariat' is, in an important sense, most of the working class even in the imperialist countries - workers in the Third World have got by far the worst of both worlds. Old local industries destroyed by global companies, people being brutally driven off the land for capitalist mining and forestry and so on - basically primitive accumulation being imposed in the Third World by huge companies with the local state as its enforcers plus hired goon squads. Oddly enough, while the hold of 'there is no alternative' is incredibly strong, certainly in the First World, the world as a whole looks more like the capitalism described in vol 1 of 'Capital' than it has in a century. Phil _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
