Re: (OPE-L) Re: From Ian Wright on Weeks and Simple Commodity Production

[Paul Cockshott <wpc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul Bullock wrote:

 Paul, I thought that capital accumulation created a reserve army, whilst periodical crises reestablished the relation between capital and labour. Your view seems to be a long run Smithian idea.  paul bullock

The latent reserve army is created by the percolation of
capitalist relations of production into the peasantry and
artisanal population.

Once these are fully proletarianised you have a totally
different social formation and quite different dynamics.

The law of the tendancy of the rate of profit to fall does
not really come into effect until the proletarian population
stabilises.

The ability of the neo-liberal governments in Britain and
the US to depress the share of national income going to the
working class has been contingent upon the opening up
of capital movement to areas of the world where large
latent reserve armies exist.  Consider the change in the
relative position of the contending classes in the absence
of this possibility, and you will see a vision of the world
in 2050.

 

----- Original Message -----

From:Paul Cockshott

To: OPE-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 3:17 PM

Subject: Re: (OPE-L) Re: From Ian Wright on Weeks and Simple Commodity Production

 gerald_a_levy wrote:

Paul C wrote on  Tuesday, May 20: > It (Capitalism, JL) is inherently a transitory mode
> of production that can only persist so long as it is surrounded
> by pre-capitalist production. *Why* can't capitalism persist after the disappearance ofpre-capitalist production?In solidarity, Jerry

My hypothesis, based mainly on the history of British capitalism, the
historical lead example is that once the latent reserve army of labour,
both internal and external is exhausted, then over accumulation of
capital occurs with the following effects:

1. Organic compositions tend to rise

2. Demand for a static or falling labour pool inhibits constrains
    the production of surplus value

3. Inherent tendancies towards deflation set in in consequence which
    can only be masked by monetary and fiscal intervention by the
   state.

4. As a consequence of factor 2, the social weight and influence of
    the working class rises.

5. A combination of 3 and 4 lead to an increasing pressure to use
    non-capitalist modes of accumulation - raising the issues of
    social control of accumulation as live political issues.

This was the trajectory of first British and then other european
capitalisms up to the 1980s in the UK case and arguably up
to the present for other western european capitals.

Neo liberalism aims to get out of the contradictions by exploiting
the relative imaturity of capitalism in Asia, Latin America and
Africa to offset its maturity in Europe and North America.
This will work for a while, perhaps another 40 or 50 years,
but by the middle of the 21st century world capitalism will
be where British capitalism was at the middle of the 20th
century. The contradictions described above will then
seal its fate.
 

-- 
Paul Cockshott
Dept Computing Science
University of Glasgow



0141 330 3125

 

-- 
Paul Cockshott
Dept Computing Science
University of Glasgow



0141 330 3125