Liberal Democracy (was Robert Mundell: Genius unbound)

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Mon Feb 28 09:17:59 PST 2000



>>> Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at Princeton.EDU> 02/28/00 11:58AM >>>

Paul Mattick, Marx and Keynes: the limits of the mixed economy. Porter Sargent, 1969, p. 81-2:

"In reality, of course, the widening productivity gap between the capitalistically-developed and underdevleoped regions impairs the relaization of surplus value through the latter's increasing impoverishment. By fostering only the exploitation of primary goods production [and screw driver assembly today, as Yoshie notes], by transferring profits made in these areas to the industrially advanced nations, by imposing terms of trade favoring the developed capitalist countries, the advanced nations reduce the underdeveloped area's ability to buy mfg goods. The poorer the underdeveloped nations become, the less a market they offer for the products of the industrially advanced countries, and the less able they are to capitalize themselves and thus to increase general demand. What appears as a *realization problem* in the advanced captialist systems is a *production problem* in the less developed nations. The total effect however is a shortage of surplus value, which hinders the advance of the *general* accumulation process.

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CB: The "realization problem" is the dialectical twin of FROP in producing capitalist cyclical crisis. Underconsumption is a realization problem for the capitalists. As Marx put it:

"The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of captialist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their outer limit " (Capital vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 472-73) .

Globalization means the "masses" in question are global now.

CB

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"Whether one looks at the production process of surplus value, or its realization, when seen from teh position of total capital, the real problem of capitalism is a shortage, not an abudance, of surplus value. Ony by looking at a particular capitalist nation in isolation, or by separating the developed captialist world from the world asa whole, does an actual lack of surplus value appear as an overproduction of commodities. Similarly, it is only from the standpoint of the individual producer in any capitalist nation that an actual shortage of socially produced surplus value appears as declining market demand. But in the world at large and in each nation separately, there is overproduction, only because the level of exploitation is insufficient. For this reason, overproduction is overcome by an increase in exploitation--provided of course that the increase is large enough tto expand and extend capital and thereby increase the market demand."

As PMjr noted in another context, the unplesantness of this conclusion does not invalidate it.

This book can be bought from amazon.com (i believe) for less than $10

rb



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