Re: absolute general law of capitalist accumulation

[Waistline2]

In a message dated 7/21/2004 8:07:43 AM Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:   >there is no necessity, however, for capitalism to produce immiserization.  The organic composition of capital doesn't have to change in the way Marx assumes.  For this and other reasons, the creation of an industrial reserve army isn't a "necessity" i.e. a necessary feature of these relations.  Nor is it necessary that: "they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital." <     Comment   The increased poverty (immiserization) of the working class does not exist in a comparison of the working class with itself . . . say . . . as it existed in 1840, 1900, 1960 or 2004. The increased poverty of the working class exists in relationship to the increase of the total wealth of society and can be measured against the increase in wealth of capitalists as a class or those regarded as capitalists due to their wealth. Today's article on Bill Gates is a case in point.   The organic composition of capital does not speak of the reforms and concessions the working class wrestle from the capitalists. Rather, what is spoken of is the direction of how the productive forces increase in capacity . . . from the standpoint of the consistent increase in spending and deployment of machinery and technological development versus human labor . . . as a ratio . . and its impact on the working class and capitalists. The polarization between the poorest and the richest does in fact increase.   In the world total social capital the spending on machinery and technology rises in relationship to the spending on hands . . . even during period of absolute increase in the size of the industrial class. The amount of labor deployed in the production of commodities moves in the direction of zero . . . as an aggregate of labor ... as opposed to away from zero . . . as the general law of capital accumulation in the absolute sense.   The sometimes fast and sometimes slow improvement of production methods and/or revolutionizing of the material power of production is an absolute law of not just bourgeois production . . . but all social production.   Melvin P.