Somewhere in this exchange someone (probably Jim) already argued that scarcity can be artificial; I do not remember any response by Gil as to the nature of or the reason for the scarcity of the means of production. As I understand it, only in the earliest stages of capitalism was there a real scarcity (in physical terms) of the means of production by which capital could absorb surplus labor. Hence Malthus and Malthusianism. In other words, the population was too large then in relation to the existing scale of accumulation. It does not seem to me however that we can explain either unemployment today or the contemporary undercapitalization of whole regions due to the technical inability to produce means of production, i.e. to their scarcity. What Marx was trying to explain is why at a late stage of accumulation profits become so small that it does not pay to purchase new machinery or, to put it slightly differently, profits become insufficient to cover these purchases anyway, resulting in what Marx terms in the third volume of *Capital* the juxtaposition of idle capital and idle people. The problem at this point is hardly the physical scarcity of the means of production. To make this then the foundation of Marx's theory of surplus value is to root a social result in a technical or physical condition; it is in other words a fetishism. Moreover, the problem of the scarcity of the means of production is an anachronism. Rakesh Ethnic Studies
