From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Tue Apr 24 2007 - 13:37:30 EDT
OK if "refutation" is too strong a word, let's drop that. But I disagree with Grossman as I already said (though not mainly for the reasons Pannekoek gives) and I also disagree with the interpretation that Marx's overaccumulation refers only to the overaccumulation of constant capital in production. Grossman, Mattick and authors like that are a bit vague about whether crises are caused by insufficient surplus-value creation, or whether they are caused by the inability to re-invest the additional surplus-value realised at a profit. But essentially Grossman's idea is that in the end the crisis is due to insufficient surplus-value creation, i.e. insufficient surplus value is created to valorise the total stock of production capital. It would be very difficult to find empirical proofs corroborating different interpretations of this argument. Maybe we can observe that the total profit volume in money-prices falls, but there could be many different reasons why it falls. As I have pointed out before, the value of the stock of physical assets existing external to production by itself is larger than the physical stock of production capital in the advanced capitalist countries. In addition there also exists a very large stock of money capital. Consequently, any theory of accumulation which narrowly focuses on production capital misses two-thirds of the story. J.
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