From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Sun Apr 29 2007 - 22:07:22 EDT
A related and controversial point: in Malthus' time there was not enough capacity to produce means of production to equip the violently displaced proletariat. Hence overpopulation. Today the accumulation of capital can create more demand for labor than is newly becoming available through population growth once racist immigration controls are tightened. There may result a shortage of labor vis a vis that required to valorize what would be the newly accumulated capital. But then capital will not be accumulated in the home nation state. It will be exported and the industialization abroad may well be impetuous. A shortage of workers in the advanced capitalist then becomes an oversupply of workers. Overpopulation follows from causes opposite to those in Malthus' time of the early stages of capital accumulation. Unemployment is no longer cyclical as hidden as it may be in the prisons andstatistical trickery. But the problem of the intractability of large scale unemployment is in fact recognized in the radically pessimistic, putatively realistic ideologies coloring the outlook of society as a whole. Rakesh
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