Gene Coyle called for discussion on the following article >Today's Wall Street Journal (3/29) had two interesting features. On >the front page was "Middle Class's Fears About Coming Years Might Be >Misguided." It argues that there is good reason to believe that living >standards will get better over the next two decades. "Technology, >Global Markets Bode Well for U.S. firms And for Living Standards." As evidence of the productivity and competitiveness craze, this article is about as good as it gets. To get the discussion started, I would like to quote from pen-l's own Andrew Kliman: "Viewed in light of the law of value as Marx analyzed it in Capital, the current strategies aimed at enhancing 'competitiveness' and productivity can be seen to have a certain, though strictly limited, validity. While all new value and surplus value is only new 'congealed' labor extracted out of the labor force, individual capitals and capitalist nations appropriate value not only by extracting it by their own workers but also by means of competitive redistribution. The more productive capitals appropriate more social value and surplus value than the individual value and surplus value they extract, and conversely for the less productive." Perhaps what American capital hopes to achieve via the globalization of markets is the prolongation of the period in which extra surplus value can be achieved. In a globalized marketplace, equipped with the latest technologies, American capital may attempt to produce at less than socially necessary labor time; indeed socially necessary labor time may itself be momentarily redetermined upward for capital -intensive producers by the new competition of inefficient firms upon which the law of value will eventually fall however as a law of gravity. Andrew does not argue this, and he may well disagree with me. I raise it as a hypothesis. As I am suggesting then, globalization may enable individual capitals and capital nations to appropriate more social value and surplus value FOR A LONGER PERIOD than the individual value and surplus value a "high productivity" or "competitive" capital itself extracts. It may not only be access to markets that American capital may require but also the momentary upward redetermination of socially necessary labor time effected by the operation of the law of value in a truly globalized marketplace. The possibility of extra surplus value gives "Reason for Hope" (as the WSJ article is headlined) that "the middle class" will perhaps even be able to share in total surplus value, as it is competitively redistributed--or perhaps more realistically will merely be free (temporarily) of capital's global attempt to depress wages below the value of labor-power or the horrific slide into one of the many forms of the global industrial reserve army of labor and surplus populations. But Andrew is a pessimist, it seems. Explaining the effects of the waves of competition on the islands of extra surplus value, Andrew K continues: "To the extent that the less productive competitors catch up, however, such superprofit is eliminated: this process only redistributes the substance of value. Apart from its secondary effect in lowering the value of wages, greater productivity neither generates additional profit nor raises the rate of profit. The SAME amount of abstract labor is merely spread among a greater number of articles. Moreover, the mechanization of production that is largely responsible for greater labor productivity becomes a tendency for the rate of profit to fall, "the self-expansion of capital", to decline, as value-transferring means of production are substituted for value-creating living labor. "Hence, the quest for global 'competitiveness' restricts capital's ability to give greater employment to labor, while failure to do so restricts capital's ability to grow. Under such conditions, any renewal of profitability depends largely on increasing surplus value at the expense of variable capital (living labor, wages). Austerity is consequently not a temporary way-station on the road to 'free market' prosperity, but the future of the continuing global economic crisis." Kliman suggests however that less efficient firms actually "catch up." This seems to preserve a standard view of competition as adjustment; in real life, firms are destroyed, forever falling behind in capacities and resources. The accumulation process is simultaneously a concentration and centralization of capital on a world scale. What this means for the morphology of the global capitalist economy is not really dealt with by Andrew in his marvelously succinct article. I would suspect that it has implications for the class struggle. At any rate, if Marx's theory is correct, the productivity increases which even many progressive economists hope to achieve via, for example, new "social structures of accumulation", can be nothing but temporary nationalist solutions. I am surprised that there has not been more open debate on this line among "the heavies" on an issue of such importance. Sources: Andrew Kliman "The new forms of appearance of state capitalism". News and Letters. December 1992. for a similar treatment, see Guglielmo Carchedi, 1991. Frontiers of Political Economy. Verso. Rakesh Bhandari
