It becomes harder to maintain a belief in broad based progress when violent cycles are considered, several indicators are considered simultaneously, and inequality is highlighted. Moreover, dire conditions in Sub Saharan Africa and Central America and Nepal and Russia, etc seem to me to demonstrate that capitalism has exhausted itself as a progressive global system (see Edward Herman's "Immiserating Growth.." in Z Magazine, March 1995).
But all this has little to do with the Marxist controversy over increasing misery which is tied to labor power in particular.
So let me comment on your theoretical argument against Grossmann:
>You cite Grossmann's 'nuanced theory of immiseration'. But Grossmann
>specifically excludes the effect of price changes (and therefore of a
>cheapening of consumption goods, Grossmann, History of Political
>Economy).
Both you and Lapides forget to underline that Grossmann highlighted and *developed* Marx's critique of the iron law of wages at a physical minimum. So it could not be more false than to accuse Grossmann of forgetting how the cheapening of consumption goods in value terms would enable rises in the real wage. The task he set himself was to explain how this was compatible with the increasing physical and social misery of the working class.
Furthermore, Grossmann also excludes the effect of increased
>productivity, concentrating instead upon increased intensity of labour.
Again Grossmann makes no such exclusion. This is a rather astonishing misreading by a putative disciple.
>The latter of course will increase the value of labour power, at the
>expense of its physical endurance (plainly not the present condition, as
>the increase in life expectancy shows).
Now this is confusing. Grossmann's basic idea is that as work is intensified due to the pursuit of relative surplus value through machinery, the existing wage in real terms becomes insufficient to reproduce labor power, i.e., the *real* wage falls below the *value of labor power* (the effort established historico morally in a given society to secure a given level of use values), thus requiring the working class to fight defensively for an increase of *the money wage*.
Now the money wage, as well as the real wage, can indeed rise even as the rate of exploitation remains stable or even rises exactly because of the reduction in the unit values of the goods that enter into the workers' consumption itself the unintended result of the all around pursuit of relative surplus value--a most complex filiation of ideas most clearly explained by Geoffrey Kay in Economic Theory of the Working Class.
(To say that Grossmann did not understand this is laughable; he most emphatically rejected the classical doctrine of an iron law of wages, long before Rosdolsky who after all was his disciple.)
And it is on the basis of the workers' successful attempt to establish a higher level of real wages on the basis of successful trade union struggle over the price of labor power that a new historico-moral standard is then established, only to be violated as labor power is again pushed below its value.
Grossmann's ultimate task is to determine whether trade union organization will confront insuperable barriers in its organized attempt to continue to raise the real wage through victorious bargaining over the money wage even as capitalists continue to intensify the labor process in the pursuit of relative surplus value.
In particular Grossmann attempts to show that where variable capital once could increase proportionately with the numerical increase in the workforce, the diminishing flow of surplus value now requires that less v be used per worker eventually pushing the rate of exploitation so high that labor power is pressed below its value as determined historico-morally.
All this puts a cap on the real wages any one worker can enjoy or secure even as she is subjected to the full brunt of the rationalisation process brought on by that diminishing flow of surplus value.
This is what Grossmann means by the increasing social and physical misery of the working class. The more the worker endures, the more breakdown is deferred.
It is not an *absolute* immiseration thesis, and its irrelevance to the trajectory of contemporary capitalism is far from unclear. Even if workers are living longer--though on this you have presented no class disaggregated data which would have to include the total global proletariat exploited by capital--this does not mean their misery is not increasing. Note monumental reductions in downtime.
Lapides charges Grossmann for having confused these different dimensionalities of the wage (money, real, value), but the basic argument is built on a tenable and clear separation of these different wage forms.
Of course Grossmann was writing at a point, the
>interwar period, when not just the relative position of the worker, but
>the absolute was falling (see Jurgen Kaczynski's extensive statistics).
Grossmann specifically underlined that real wage did not have to fall, much less be pushed to a physiological minimum, for the misery of the working class to increase. Moreover, you are distorting Kucyinski's wage theory--see his New Fashions in Wage Theory.
>It was not surprising, then, that he should place his emphasis upon what
>was characteristic of that time, increase in absolute surplus value,
>fall in the quantity of use-values the workers' wage would secure.
Grossmann does not use the term absolute surplus value to explain this process. And the quantity of use value does not have to fall in physical terms. Labor power must be pushed below its value.
>More instructive than Grossmann is Roman Rosdolsky's Chapter, 'The so-
>called "theory of immiseration"' (Making of Marx's Capital, vol1, p300).
I'll reread Rosdolsky who was a disciple of Grossmann from whom he doubtless got the idea that Marx was a critic of the classic iron law of wages which you seem to be using synomously with the theory of immiseration.
>And most importantly he understood that it was a complete lie to say
>that Marx's theory rested on the cornerstone of absolute immiseration.
Grossmann did not rest his theory thusly.
I once thought you considered yourself a student of Grossmann's; I am glad that you have clarified that you are so critical of him that you don't even want to take the time to understand him.
Yours, Rakesh