[PEN-L:27006] Re: re: centripetal accumulation

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 18/06/02 00:59 -0700, you wrote:
> On coffee: perhaps a luxury item to some (tho try taking it away from an
> Italian!), it is the US's leading import after oil and is a global US$50 bn
> industry, so of some larger significance.


Interesting. But it is not exactly a commodity meeting the needs of the
"stomach".


> On Luxemburg: that primitive accumulation (of surplus value outside of the
> capitalist world) is essential to sustain the profitability of capitalism;
> updated, one could argue that paying workers below the cost of reproduction
> is a modern form of primitive accumulation, as are various forms of
> environmental destruction (i.e. exploiting natural resources without
> safeguarding their longterm viability - which some sustainable development
> arguments get at).


Thanks very much. I assume from "A Dictionary of Marxist Thought" Bottomore
ed second edtion p 328 that this was laid out in "The Accumulation of
Capital" 1913:

"A closed capitalist economy, she argued, without access to non-capitalist
social formations, must break down through inability to absorb all the
surplus value produced by it."

I do not think this can be correct, although obviously in 1913 something
was going to have to break.

I have never heard of a major controversy of marxist interpretation about
the formula in the Communist Manifesto:-

"And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by the
enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the
conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough expansion of the old ones."

This is a remarkably flexible formula. We can easily see in retrospect that
a portion of old capital, dead labour, had to be destroyed in 1913. That
occurred through war. In 1929-32 it occurred through the slump.

Yes the tendency is for capitalism, finance capitalism, imperialism, to
expand. Small and subsistence producers are pouring off the face of the
planet and becoming a reserve army of labour for capital, at a rate
unprecedented in history. New commodities - brown carbonated fizzy drinks
containing caffeine, and tobacco in stylish packets are eating into more
traditional forms of social relaxation on a global basis.

But if bits of capitalism have to go bankrupt they go bankrupt. And in a
sense Africa could drop off the map and finance capital would go on
reproducing itself as a system.

As for exploiting the natural environment more intensively, yes capitalism
externalises the costs of sustaining repeatable development. But the most
advanced finance capital will be in a better position to adapt to new
ecological regulations than poor local capital.

Capitalism is an enormously flexible system. I do not think Luxemburg is
correct in saying its destruction - as a system - is inevitable. (Nor that
the choice is only barbarism or socialism). That is because capitalism
periodically destroys part of itself.

If anything this process intensifies centripetal forces. If it is not
pushed it won't fall. But the people of the LDC are not in a decisive
position to push. We will need to appeal to the reforming instincts of the
population of the more developed countries to make a global alliance
against capitalism.

Chris Burford