>"If we assume with
>the 'experts' the economic infinity of capital accumulation, then the vital
>foundation on which socialism rests will disappear. . . . "
Max replied:
>Infinity is a pretty long time, but the indeterminateness of
>capitalism's life span should be pretty obvious. In other words,
>if you can't tell me when it will end, and if it doesn't look like
>it will end any time soon, its longevity is indeterminate. This
>would seem to throw quite a monkey wrench into this particular
>interpretation of Marx.
I think there is a more fundamental criticism of your use of Luxemburg, Rakesh. But first refresh my memory if you will: to which of the crisis theories was she tying the assertion of "the objective impossibility of capitalism"? Falling profit rate? Disproportionality? Whichever one it was, or some combination of them, the point is, each of them still exists today--they are central tendencies of the accumulation process--but in a such a different context as to severely call into question any claims for impossibility. As far as the eye can see or the mind can imagine, that is.
More than that, such claims themselves are ahistorical and decidedly unmarxian. Marx never made them. In fact, Marx identified those problems as tendencies, to be analyzed with their counteracting forces. Any claims of impossibility, I believe, are foreign to his whole approach (he never predicted anything substantial--with the possible exception that he would always remain poor--starting with that canard he is most saddled with--the increasing immiseration of the working class). Rather, he set out the laws of motion as he understood them from the material conditions of his time. It is your job and mine, Rakesh, to apply those laws to today's conditions to make sense out of where we are, before we can begin to try to figure out where we want to go. (Actually Marx's use of the words law and tendency can be confusing. For example: "the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall". That means he was positing a "law" that there is such a tendency. In any case, he clearly meant to set out tendencies of capitalism as an historical system, not laws that were to be considered in some sense immutable.
Material conditions have changed markedly since both Marx and Luxemburg wrote. Back then, there was a clear and direct class struggle over the extraction of surplus value from the labor process. Marx could look at that and see a long run tendency for the aggregate profit rate to fall, due to the progressive (labor saving) mechanization of production (causing c/v to rise faster than s/v). But, again, in formulating the "law of the tendency" he carefully laid out 6 counteracting forces that could arrest this tendency. In no case did he claim a falling profit rate was a logical necessity of capitalism.
Capitalist production now produces massive amounts of surplus value relative to labor and capital inputs. This must be obvious. Just look at annual GDP, and subtract the sum of some measure of the social subsistence (reproduction cost) of productive labor + capital stock consumed (depreciation, or capital consumption allowances in the NIPA). You will get a very large number. Do the calculations historically, say back to 1946, and watch that number grow as a percent of GDP (add in foreign production of US based companies and watch it grow even more).
In Marx's day, most surplus value appeared as profits and was accumulated. Now what is called profits accounts for only a small, and shrinking, share of realized surplus value. At a minimum, that tells you that the struggle over profits and accumulation has shifted from the clear, class based one within the labor (production) process to a much broader arena, including a within-class battle much different than what Marx saw (including, e.g., the internationalization of production and fight over the terms of inflation), the political system (a portion of s is taxed, in various forms, and redistributed in many ways), the massive growth in unproductive labor (defined as not directly productive of surplus value for capital), etc. The struggle over the distribution of s affects profits and accumulation, but the forces at play are much more diffuse and the arenas much more numerous than when Marx laid out his laws of motion. And the relationship between these forces and the capital accumulation process is much more complex. (And I'm here sticking to the M-C-M' simple model of Marx, and not even touching on the ways that M' is supplemented through the international money system--a whole new battlefield over new forms of s).
Point is, any impossibility claim must be rethought. Talk of it as an objective fact toward which capitalism tends, unaccompanied by a rigorous analysis of the many diverse forces that affect accumulation in today's world, is, um, not helpful. I say that, knowing that your purpose was a good one: trying to counterpose some kind of objective condition to a largely unhelpful idealist discussion of socialist principles.