O'Connor on crisis theory, etc.

[Charles Brown]

What of the fact that the capitalist
appropriates all that is produced
in the factory ? This appropriation
takes place in the factory , not
in the market.  Why not construe this
as the root cause in this theory of
crisis,thereby
locating its explanation in production,
inside the factory gates,
and not in the market ? The fundamental
contradiction of capitalism is that production
is social but appropriation is private, and
business cycle crisis is rooted in this
contradiction which is in production.

Charles Brown


>>> Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> 11/24 4:44 AM >>>
In message <l03020900b27f76c27622@[128.114.140.14]>, Barbara Laurence
<cns at cats.ucsc.edu> writes
> This is why S/V is the
>central category in Marxist thought. It is a quantitative measure of the
>potential (or not) of the system to suffer a realization crisis; it's also
>a qualitative measure of capital's power over labor. The greater the latter
>(e.g., since late 1970s in the US), the higher will be S/V hence the
>greater the problem of realizing value (solved in the 1980s by military
>spending and hyper-consumerism and in the 1990s by hyper-consumerism (even
>more than the 1980s) and exports (mainly).

This misses out the extensive argument in Marx's second volume of
capital, that reproduction on an increasing scale is possible because
the capital goods sector also contributes to demand. It is just wrong to
say that only v = demand. S, too equals demand.

It seems a rather narrow interpretation of sociology to me to think that
all change is located at the level of market exchange. Does society stop
at the factory gates?

-- 
Jim heartfield