[PEN-L:29539] production & realization

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: production & realization

[RE: [PEN-L:29528] Re: RE: Liu on Stiglitz]
Henry C.K. Liu:
> Because transferring wealth from the poor to the rich is an
> unsustainable game.

Carrol Cox:
>... to affirm that "transferring wealth from the poor to the rich is an unsustainable game" is a denial of the founations of marxism, the theory of surplus value. Where else has wealth _ever_ come from except by transfer from the poor (producers) to the rich (appropriators). The image Henry gives is a static one which dissolves the unity (and therefore the contradiction) of capital and labor.

>The horror of capitalism is that it is _both_ unsustainable _and_, apparently, indefinitely sustainable, becoming ever more destructive (and self-destructive) but always arising from its own ashes. If you don't hit it it won't fall, as someone once said.<

I wouldn't call the production of surplus-value a "transfer" from the workers to the capitalists. As old Karlos said one time, workers pay the capitalists surplus-value in return for the latter allowing them to survive (by hiring them). ("the worker purchases the right to work for his own livelihood only by paying for it in surplus-value" (volume I, 1967 Int'l Publ. ed.: p. 69).)

You're right that the production of surplus-value is (in theory) sustainable forever, as is the redistribution to the capitalists from other groups. But that doesn't mean that realization and other problems (e.g., with the natural environment) don't arise as part of the same process. _Laissez-faire_ (blatantly pro-business) capitalism of the sort that prevailed in the 1920s and the 1980s-90s eventually causes an underconsumption undertow that increasingly drags the system into crisis. Counteracting influences -- such as increasing extension of credit -- eventually fail, so the economy falls, as happened in 1929-33 and seems to be happening now. (However, we can't say yet that the magnitude of the current problem is as big as that of the 1930s.)

Carrol is also right that the system isn't going to dig its own grave as a result. There's no social force ready to replace the capitalists in power, at least not in the US (but I can't think of where one exists). So it's likely that all we'll see is "regime change" (to coin a phrase), in which a new New Deal comes about, with people like Stiglitz or Krugman replacing Lawrence Lindsay, Kenneth Rogoff, Stanley Fischer, _et al_, but with capitalism continuing. (At most, it would be a political revolution.)

JD