Louis Proyect wrote: > Tugan-Baranovsky said the same thing: > > "Even if all workers were replaced by machinery except for one > worker, this single worker would be able to put into motion the vast > mass of machinery, and with its help create new machines–and means of > consumption…The working class could disappear; this would not disturb > in the least the self-expansion of capitalism."
So, Lou, are you now trying to label me a "Harmonicist" a la Tugan? You've tried to associate me with Kautsky before, of sad memory among classical Marxists. Please don't. That's scary. Anyway, I cannot look now at the context of Tugan's remarks, but it seems to me that you are a bit confused. What I really meant in what I wrote is that, under the assumption of a growing capital composition (and the other typical assumptions used in other Marxist works of the epoch: Lenin, Luxemburg, Bukharin, Bauer, Sternberg, Tugan-Baranowsky, Moskowska, Varga, etc.), social reproduction can go on forever as long as the surplus value rate is allowed to increase. Some Marxists (e.g. Lenin) noticed or had the intuition of this. It's a mathematical fact that can be shown even more generally -- i.e. with less assumptions than those made in most of those works. If I thought it worthwhile (but I don't), I would go and re-read all that stuff and figure out where they were wrong or right. Most of them presented their reasonings in arithmetic (not even algebraic) terms. So, with the hindsight of almost a century, it'd be easy for us to pinpoint their flaws. Anyway, Tugan here seems to be taking the argument to an unwarranted extreme: the disappearance of the working class. That is definitely not entailed by what I wrote. A growing organic capital composition does *not* entail the disappearance of the working class. And, in fact, an expansion of the surplus value rate *requires* the existence of a working class. The surplus value rate is a ratio between the two components of living labor or value added. I don't see how you can have living labor without workers. If you really read what I wrote, you'll notice that I go even further than stating that, under Grossman's assumptions, there's no breakdown. Even if you fix the surplus value rate and allow for the capital composition to increase (a strange choice of assumptions), you get the profit rate to converge to zero... but that need not lead to the breakdown of capitalism a la Grossman. I mean, look around you. Look at the real return on capital invested in a whole family of "safe" assets -- the real expected yield on short-term Treasuries. That's the return rate on capital for you (adjusted for risk), as of today. In real terms, that yield is not zero, but negative. That means that adjusting for risk and inflation, current expected profit rates in the U.S. are now in negative territory across a large spectrum of asset choices. Now, tell me, has U.S. capitalism broken down yet? That said, my view is that even the most general proofs of the proposition that social reproduction in the abstract can go on forever (yes, even with finite natural resources) are extremely unrealistic if you contrast them with the messy world around us. This is something I said in a recent post in reply to Les. Many big and little events could throw monkey wrenches in the reproductive machinery of capitalism. Yet no disruption in the social reproduction of capitalism is a breakdown in Grossman's sense. Bottom line: Capitalist reproduction is fragile. But capitalism doesn't breakdown by itself. The workers need to find it intolerable and rebel. And then build an alternative that is robust enough to withstand the backlash. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
