(Interesting piece by Spiked online's token Marxist) http://www.platypus1917.org/archive/article135/ Living Marxism James Hartfield December 2008
One of the stranger sights in today’s banking crisis is the sudden popularity of Karl Marx. The Manifesto is flying off the shelves, and business execs are boning up on Marx’s crisis theory in much the same way that they used to lap up Sun Tzu’s Art of War, or parrot Heraclitus’ saying that there is nothing permanent but change.
Today’s economic dislocation, though, does not correspond to the crisis of overaccumulation that Marx explained in the third volume of his book Capital. Marx’s analytical reconstruction of capitalism was made at a time of great forward momentum in industrialization, made under the discipline of what he called the ‘capitalist mode of accumulation’.
Abbreviating his argument, we could say that Marx anticipates that as capital accumulates, non-productive investment in ‘dead labour’ (technology, raw materials, plant and so on) tends to crowd out investment in ‘living labour’. But ‘living labour’ is the only source of new value. When capitalists replace workers by machines they kill the goose that lays the golden egg. The consequence is a crisis of overaccumulation as the investment in capital leads to falling profit rates, which in turn results in a contraction of investment, and then a recession and the destruction of capital.
Capital, Volume III was of interest to me and my comrades in Britain in the 1980s, since we (rightly, I think) saw the economic crisis that had begun in the 1970s as a crisis arising out of overaccumulation, along the lines that Marx had set out. All around us, capitalism was clearly in crisis. But Marx’s explanation was such a threatening proposition that all intellectual work was dedicated to showing that on the contrary, capitalism was the only viable way of organizing production. Nowadays there is more of a tendency to exaggerate the crisis tendencies, and the collapse of capitalism is announced on a regular basis since the 1988 recession, or the 1998 difficulties in East Asia and Russia, the dot.com collapse in 2001, and so on.
People forget, though, that it was quite exceptional back in the 1970s and 1980s even for those who called themselves Marxists to insist on the rightness of Marx’s theory of overaccumulation. In fact, the ‘Marxists’ for the most part used up a lot of time trying to show that Marx was wrong about overaccumulation, or even that he never said (or meant) what he wrote in the third volume of Capital.
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