"I did, and the greatness of the chapter eludes me. Recessions and competitive pressures drive capitalists towards innovation, market expansion, and greater levels of exploitation. I swear I've learned more by reading the business press over the years than that sort of thing could teach me."
Don't get this at all Doug. You and Seth are pointing to the importance of Marx's obviously incomplete chapter on counter-tendencies. Grossman triples them, adds empirical support and analyzes the specific roles trade and export of capital as counter-tendencies. And now you say there is nothing there. But it's an obvious improvment over the chapter about which you are raving.
And I find your comment doubly perplexing because Grossman is analyzing much of what was reported in the business press as the new features of capitalism in terms of what precise effects they have on value based magnitudes, to what extent they would improve the appropriation of unpaid labor time. That is not what the business press does. And Grossman was an accomplished statistician who seems to have devoured the business press from four languages. So it isn't a matter of beating the business press but framing its findings and organizing that data and bringing out its theoretical significance--explaining it, step by step, out of the law of value and the single institutionally imposed goal of profit-seeking.
Note also that levels of exploitation is in fact not there for the most part as it was reserved for the last chapter not included in the translation.
"And the last line is very revealing - it's as if he couldn't help himself, after acknowledging the countertendencies at some length, he just had to return to the mode of terminal crisis."
It's not the last line.
"He gets points for predicting the Great Depression (though some bourgeois commentators were alarmed in the late 1920s too). But as bad as the crisis was, it wasn't terminal. In fact, after 15 years of depression and war, the capitalist world embarked on a great boom that lasted for almost 30 years."
It wasn't terminal but it was catastrophic, and it was ended by the destruction of capital and/or organized labor through the destruction of lives through depression, war, death, and multiple holocausts. The situation could not be overcome through parliamentary majorities or unions, either.
So do you think that this disproves or proves him prescient for goodness sake?
"The reason to want to transcend capitalism is because it produces polarization, alienation, banality, and environmental ruin, not because the OCC's gonna drive us into the dirt."
Oh boy, you are simply missing the relation between the rising OCC and the rising rate of surplus value. Again it's not a meeting with a grim reaper but a slave class whose reproduction as slaves is even put in jeopardy.
With (as Harvard's and the NBER's Richard Freeman says) a doubling of the global labor force vis a vis the supply of capital (whose persistent relative scarcity cries out for explanation), this is certainly a likely fate for today's toilers. Freeman puts his faith on multinationals not sacrificing their labor standards and consumers paying a bit extra for humanely produced goods.
I hope he is right.
At any rate, as Rick Kuhn shows in his award winning biography, Grossman certainly did not think the response of the working class would be automatic; in that sense he was not a mechanical Marxist. He did think the system of normal capital accumulation would break but he emphasized that would lead to qualitatively new and catastrophic outcomes--for example aggressive warfare, suspension of market freedoms for workers--and the old political means of parliaments and unions would not be up to the challenge of securing the welfare of the working class.
The book is a polemic against Hilferding and Otto Bauer after all.
And perhaps it is outdated for the reason Eubulides says--state management of the financial sector. I hope he too is right.
AH
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