population

[djones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (rakesh bhandari)]

I would be happy if anyone has thoughts about Marx's law of population.
Here are some ideas which I sent to someone privately.

It has been suggested to me that  James K Galbraith (John's son indeed) has
to assume the existence of such an excess of surplus value to keep alive
the prospects of liberal intervention on behalf of  the poor. In other
words,  Galbraith seems to think the state can draw from the new excess of
surplus value, resulting from capital-saving innovations,  to generate
economic activity for the underclass,

It is interesting that the cowriter of his new macroeconomics textbook
William Darity, jr has written on  the likely extermination of the black
underclass--"The Undesirables, Americ's Underclass in the Mangerial Age:
Beyond the Myrdal Theory of Racial Inequality", Daedulus, Winter 1995:
145-165 (see also his book *The Black Underclass: Essays in Race and
Unwantedness*).   Darity draws upon Alvin Gouldner to depict the state as
run by the new managerial class which has no economic need for reproducing
a reserve army of labor which will become targetted for extermination.

What is interesting is that, for Darity,  while under capitalism, an
industrial reserve army of labor needs to be maintained, under the
managerial mode no such reserve is needed. So, according to him,  we are
now beyond capitalism, as well as Marx's historically determinate theory of
population. Darity  provides an interesting argument  that the 20th century
has seen the birth of a new bureaucratic-technocratic-managerial mode of
production, indicating that Marxism as a theory of emancipation is now
outdated (of course Moishe Postone has written a very
challenging,overwhelmingly brilliant criticism of earlier attempt to
theorize such a transition, viz., the Frankfurt School's Friedrich
Pollock's theory of 'planned capitalism').

Also, in James Becker's *Marxian Political Economy--an outline* I also read
a reference to JE Cairnes theory of non-competing groups, perhaps also a
category with which we can supplement Marx's theory of population.

rakesh




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