Law Of The Accumulation And Breakdown by Henryk Grossman

Author:Henryk Grossman
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The elasticity of accumulation

Luxemburg criticises Marx’s scheme of expanded reproduction in the following terms: ‘The limits of this expansion are each time determined in advance by the amount of surplus value which is to be capitalised in any given case’ (1968, p. 330). She goes on to state that:

The diagram thus precludes the expansion of production by leaps and bounds. It only allows of a gradual expansion which keeps strictly in step with the formation of surplus value ... For the same reason, the diagram presumes an accumulation which affects both departments equally and therefore all branches of capitalist production. It precludes expansion of the demand by leaps and bounds just as much as it prevents a one-sided or precocious development of individual branches of capitalist production. Thus the diagram assumes a movement of the aggregate capital which flies in the face of the actual course of capitalist development. (p. 342)

This criticism has generated a whole school. A series of Marxist writers have repeated Luxemburg’s objections assuring us that Lenin was the first to formulate the law of the uneven development of capitalism. Evgeny Varga tells us that in ‘Capital Marx did not give a purely economic foundation to the law of the uneven development of capitalism. He took the totality of phenomena as his starting point’ (1926, ‘Der uberimperialismus’, p. 246). Apparently ‘Lenin was the first to propose the law of uneven development’ (p. 248). Likewise Nikolai Bukharin refers to the ‘Leninist law of the unevenness of capitalist development’ (1926, p. 9). As always Sternberg blindly follows whatever Luxemburg has to say: ‘in a rigid schema of exchange under pure capitalism the sporadic development of individual industries would be inconceivable’(1926, p. 153).

The falsehood of this view is perfectly obvious. Marx ridiculed the harmonist theory of a balanced proportional accumulation in all spheres of production. If this sort of accumulation were possible crises would not exist. This is why Marx says:

there would be no overproduction, if demand and supply corresponded to each other, if the capital were distributed in such proportions in all spheres of production, that the production of one article involved the consumption of the other, and thus its own consumption. There would be no overproduction, if there were no overproduction. Since, however, capitalist production can allow itself free rein only in certain spheres, under certain conditions, there would be no capitalist production at all if it had to develop simultaneously and evenly in all spheres. (1969, p. 532)

Luxemburg’s criticisms could only have arisen through a failure to grasp the basic aspects of Marx’s methodological procedure. Marx’s reproduction scheme represents the average line of accumulation, that is the ideal normal trajectory in which accumulation occurs proportionally in both departments. In reality there are deviations from this average line —Marx himself repeatedly draws attention to the elastic power of capital —but these deviations are only explicable in terms of the average line. Luxemburg’s mistake is that a model that represents only the ideal trajectory in a range of possibilities is taken for an exact description of the actual trajectory of capital.

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