I was just looking over the blog and saw Brendan's comment that there can't really be a problem of "overproduction" in capitalism--that the capitalists gobble up whatever's left over. I don't think I understand that. I'm looking at the footnote on p. 391 where Marx mentions a couple of contradictions in capital: a.) workers are important as buyers of commodities but as sellers of labor-power they are restricted to the minimum required to keep them coming back to the factory every day. Thins links up with the second: b.) periods of full capitalist productive assertion are periods of overproduction, b/c the sale of commodities is restricted by the consumer needs in a society where most people are poor. Any thoughts?
I ask because I'm trying to keep contradiction and crisis in the center-stage of my reading, I don't feel like I've got a solid grip there, and I think we're going to get at least a little more about soon in Part III . I'd love to have an ongoing discussion about crisis if possible.
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Agreed that crisis should be the focus of reading volume 2. But also we must keep in mind that vol. 2 attempts to explain what would be necessary in order for capitalism to achieve equilibrium. Vol. 3's job is to explain why that equilibrium can never be reached. I tend to agree with Harvey that the insights of vol. 2 and 3 aren't well integrated with each other, at least not explicitly.
ReplyDeleteRe. overproduction. I'm not sure what comment it is that you were referring to. I may have not phrased myself correctly. Because Marx has refuted Say's law we know that crisis can happen: there can be overproduction, underconsumption, etc. But I think that the theoretical difficulties arise when we try to say that overproduction is the cause of the crisis. A crisis, almost by definition, is a situation where the circuit of capital is frozen in all of its stages, unsold commodities, unused productive capacity, unemployed workers, idle money capital. But that doesn't mean that crisis has come about as a result of overproduction.
My thinking is not fully formed on this but I did give a talk at the LEft Forum on this topic this past Spring and the Rethinking Marxism Conference last November. The text and video is here: http://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/value-crisis-and-marxs-order-of-operations-finale-draft/
I assume though that my comment wasn't about overproduction but underconsumption. The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably and sometimes not. My understanding of the critique of underconsumptionist arguments is 2 fold:
1. "the restricted consumption of the working class" is not the only limit to the realization of surplus value. In fact the working class, by definition, can only realize the value of the variable capital laid out in wages. The capitalist class, by buying and selling amongst each other, realized the surplus value.
2. Many underconsumptionists argue that the long-term stagnation of wages is behind the current crisis. But driving wages down is actually good for capitalism. It raises the rate of profit. If the lowering of wages hinders the realization of commodity value in the market this loss can never be greater than the initial gain made by lowering wages. In other words: if I have toothbrush factory and I cut wages by $100 a week I have now $100 more commodity value to sell. If I can't realize the value of these commodities in the market due to the fact that workers have $100 less to spend then my profit rate is back to where I started. There is no aggregate loss on my part.
Of course argument 1 requires that capitalism is able to achieve the proper balance between production of consumer goods and production of capital goods. If there were a disproportion between departments one and two then there could be an overproduction/underconsumption of consumer goods. But the equilibrium between departments should be established by the free flow of capital between departments. If there is an overproduction in one department capital should flow into another.
The only reason this wouldn't happen would be in the context of a falling rate of profit (vol. 3). Here a surplus of capital is faced with decreasing profit rates. As the capitalist class becomes increasingly desperate to sink this capital into worthy investments all manner of overproduction, speculation, etc. break out.