[lbo-talk] Constant Capital and the Crisis in Contemporary Capitalism

[James Heartfield]

Michael, I am looking at your paper now, but one objection that strikes me straight away is that when you write about Marx's assumption of a rising organic composition of capital, I have to ask whether you think that assumption applies to the recent growth of capitalism.

I mean that since the end of the cold war, there has been a marked expansion of capital that has been labour, rather than capital intensive. for the last twenty years. With labour costs held down and new layers of people drawn into wage labour, both in the developed world, and in the former Stalinist bloc, there has been little need for investors to seek labour saving technologies, and pursue intensive growth, when they have been able to accrue what Marx called 'absolute surplus value' by extensive growth, creating new points of production, rather than revolutionising the existing productive base. I write about that here: http://www.metamute.org/en/a_crisis_of_under_accumulation