Re: Interesting exchange on overproduction (from psn-l)

["dmschanoes" <dmschanoes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Charles, I do not think you are offering Keynesian palliatives as a
solution for capitalism.  I do think confusion on this issue allows some
others to blur the critical lines of Marx's analysis.

The category of underconsumption is subject to such confusion because
consumption itself  appears as unmediated, unhistorical needs- subsistence
requirements or above-- but somehow detached, not class specific--
immutable, universal etc.  And that can lead for the historical specificity
of capitalism, for its specific class relations, embodied in the production
of commodities, to be discounted-- by others.

I think you are half-right in your analysis that any wage is "too little,"
and "underconsumption" is inherent in the system.  But that is not the same
thing as overproduction.  Marx in his distillation of the actual capitalist
mechanisms, leads us to focus on the relations, social, of production and
then takes that focus and breaks it down again into the relations between
the living and dead components of production.  If it is the organization of
the means of production as private property, and its exchange with labor
organized as wage-labor that determines the metamorphoses of the "economy,"
then those same relations, that exchange between components of production
must also account for the "crises," disruptions in the production process.

 So it must be in the conversion of surplus value into capital that we find
overproduction, -- that is to say conversion  of wage labor into private
property that exceeds the bounds of capitalist production itself-- profit,
and we must find it not in the failure of the markets to perform but in
their great success-- as a result of their great success.  This is not a
relationship of consumption of the surplus value, of the surplus product,
but of the reproduction of the terms of exchange where the growth of the
means of production through the accumulation of capital-- that is to say
private ownership undermines  that ownership-- that alienated production
itself, and undermines the ability of exchange value production to maintain
profit..

This is, in my opinion, the kernel in Marx's discussions of overproduction
in The Grundrisse, and Theories of Surplus Value.  At least that's where I
take the arguments, (as already agreed, Marx argued various positions at
various times),  and why I am not comfortable with notions of
underconsumption.

dms



~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.