At 11:36 29/03/2007, jim devine wrote:
Marx's theory in CAPITAL (volume 1) is mostly about job destruction.
This focuses on a representative industry, i.e., one that represents
the abstract general laws of accumulation. But there are also
processes of job creation in Marx: if aggregate accumulation is fast
enough, that increases aggregate employment (which may or may not
raise real wages enough to reduce the rate of surplus-value).
Yes, Jim is right, but there are other factors to keep in mind.
Remember that Marx assumes that the standard of necessity is given
for a given country, era, etc. Thus, by that assumption, increased
productivity cannot lead to rising real wages. If we relax that
assumption (all other things equal), productivity increases [falling
values of the wage bundle] mean rising real wages which may be rather
relevant for employment; the necessary [but unacknowledged] premise
for relative surplus value is job destruction, i.e., an increased
technical composition of capital. Insofar as there are both
productivity increases and increases in the variable which I call
'the degree of separation among workers' [the X-factor], a likely
result is, as Marx acknowledges, an increase in both real wages and
the rate of surplus value. On this see my 'Beyond CAPITAL' but
especially 'The Politics of Assumption, the Assumption of Politics'
(the Deutscher Lecture published in Historical Materialism, 14.2,
2006) which both reinforce these inferences with cites from Marx's
1861-63 Economic Manuscripts.
Relevance to the current discussion? What about the effect
of globalisation upon (a) the prices of commodities consumed [the
Wall-mart factor] and (b) weakening of US workers as the result of
the increase in the degree of separation from other workers [the X-factor]?
michael
Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Currently based in Venezuela.
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