Concerning Marx's statement of "the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation," Charles asks
Does the empirical generalization suggested below have validity today nationally or globally ?
You could certainly point to recent economic phenomena supporting an affirmative answer to this question. E.g., in the US, the fact that significant increases in productivity have helped make it possible for capitalist firms to make do with their existing workforces rather than increasing employment in proportion to the increase in national output. However, I'd argue that such changes, where they occur, are not *secular* as Marx's "general law" requires.
Specifically: Marx understands his law to apply to the situation of developed capitalist economies. His statement of the law implies secularly or tendentially increasing rates of poverty and unemployment in such economies. I don't think we've seen secularly increasing rates of poverty and unemployment in developed capitalist economies (though I'd be interested to hear others' assessments of the long-run trends for these phenomena), despite overall population growth and consequent increases in the size of the working class.
Part of the problem might be the "law" itself. Granting entirely Marx's premise that capitalist accumulation is accompanied by continuous increases in the organic composition of capital (implying increasing output per worker), it doesn't follow that a "reserve army" will necessarily be created--rather, just that the aggregate demand for labor power will expand less quickly than the rate of capital accumulation.
There is another potential problem with Marx's argument that has unexpectedly far-reaching implications. Granting Marx's inference that "the general law" implies the creation of a (growing) industrial reserve army (IRA) of the unemployed, it obviously follows that the rate of accumulation is not constrained by aggregate labor supply. But then what is it constrained by? Specifically, why don't profit-seeking capitalists increase the rate of accumulation (which can be done profitably, since the existence of an IRA implies that doing so won't put upward pressure on wages) to the point where the aggregate labor supply is a binding constraint?
I can imagine a variety of answers to this question, but all of them seem to create significant difficulties either for the validity of the "general law" itself or for the logical coherence of the value theory from which Marx derives this "law".
For example, suppose it's argued that, given the presence of the IRA, the rate of accumulation is constrained by the total funds capitalists have available for accumulation--that is, by the magnitude of total profit, equal to the average money rate of profit times the pecuniary value of the capital stock. This implies that the rate of capital accumulation is constrained by the level of the profit rate. But this is a steadily diminishing constraint, since the same process of technical change that creates the IRA also lowers unit production costs and thus raises the profit rate. And in any case, rising profit rate or not, so long as the rate of profit net of the rate of increase in the organic composition exceeds the growth rate of the labor force, the labor constraint must eventually be binding, thus tendentially eliminating the IRA.
Gil
