Jim Devine wrote:
>Some might say that the period from 1973 to 1992 or so in the US was a
>"great depression" of sorts. I don't find this very useful, either. If
>people want to call it a great depression, that's fine with me, but since
>the three "depressions" were so different from each other, it's hard to
>lump them all together. Maybe "times of troubles" is a good substitute...
Jim's comment on great depressions frames an issue that I've been wanting to
bring up but haven't figured out how to express. Suppose the period 1873 to
1897 might be best characterized with regard to Marx's observation that:
a large part of available capital is constantly more or less depreciated
in the course of the reproduction process, because the value of commodities
is not determined by the labour-time originally expended in their production,
but by the labour-time expended in their reproduction, and this decreases
continually owing to the development of the social productivity of labour.
What if we push the preceding argument "Beyond Capital" (so to speak) to
consider the depreciation of wage labour on more or less the same basis?
Somewhere in vol. III of Capital (I haven't been able to track down the
location), Marx criticized those vulgar political economists who become so
enamored of the idea of interest-bearing capital that they even proclaim
wages as a form of interest on the labourer's "capital". Gary Becker, eat
your heart out.
But couldn't we imagine that by some time around the third quarter of the
twentieth century a considerable portion of employment income in the U.S.
had taken on the characteristics of a legal claim on revenues, backed by
"credentials", similar to what share ownership represents (thereby
anticipating the trend of compensating employees with stock options)? By
analogy, this would give us "fictitious human capital" and we could view the
1973-1992 period as one of shaking out the fictitious human capitals and
concentrating the legal claims on future revenues. Telling the story this
way begins to make 1973-1992 look a bit more like 1873-1897 -- or perhaps I
should say more like its mirror image.
The identity of surplus-value and surplus-labour imposes a qualitative limit
upon the accumulation of capital. This consists of the *total working-day*,
and the prevailing development of the productive forces and of the
population,
which limits the number of simultaneously exploitable working-days. But
if one
conceives of surplus-value in the meaningless form of interest, the limit is
merely quantitative and defies all fantasy.
That qualitative limit on the accumulation of capital is also, *pari passu*,
a limit on the extent to which the worker can participate as a "stake
holder" in his/her self-exploitation. The problem with the analogy between
fictitious capital and fictitious human capital is, of course, that the
owners of human capital also have to supply labour-power in order to receive
their "interest payments". This might explain why hours worked have become
unhinged from productivity considerations over the last 25 years or so --
people are getting paid for "putting in hours", not for performing work.
Are we headed for a crash? I'll be provocative here: I don't think it
matters. At this point it seems to me that the end of the recent boom will
have immense social and political consequences. That is to say, a "soft
landing" may be the worst thing that could happen to the "new economy" --
just as a stalemate was the worst thing that could happen to the two-party
political monopoly. My inclination is to expect a lull that after a while
will begin to feel uncomfortably entrenched.
"Business is always thoroughly sound and the campaign
in full swing, until suddenly the debacle takes place."
Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island, BC
