The Accumulation of Capital. Rosa Luxemburg

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ I and 16 + 1·6 constant capital for Department II and the 24 units of consumers’ goods provide 11 + 4 wages of labour already employed, 5·5 + 2 for consumption out of surplus, and 1·1 + 0·4 addition to variable capital, which provide for an addition to employment.

      After the investment has been made, and the labour force increased in proportion to the wages bill, we have

	c	v	s	Gross Output
Department I	48·4	12·1	12·1	72·6
Department II	17·6	4·4	4·4	26·4
Total				99

      The two departments are now equipped to carry out another round of investment at the prescribed rate, and the process of accumulation continues. The ratios happen to have been chosen so that the total labour force, and total gross output, increase by 10 per cent per annum.[22]

      But all this, as Rosa Luxemburg remarks, is just arithmetic.[23] The only point of substance which she deduces from Marx’s numerical examples is that it is always Department I which takes the initiative. She maintains that the capitalists in Department I decide how much producers’ goods to produce, and that Department II has to arrange its affairs so as to absorb an amount of producers’ goods which will fit in with their plans.[24] On the face of it, this is obviously absurd. The arithmetic is perfectly neutral between the two departments, and, as she herself shows, will serve equally well for the imagined case of a socialist society where investment is planned with a view to consumption.[25]

      But behind all this rigmarole lies the real problem which she is trying to formulate. Where does the demand come from which keeps accumulation going?

      She is not concerned with the problem, nowadays so familiar, of the balance between saving and investment. Marx himself was aware of that problem, as is seen in his analysis of disequilibrium under conditions of simple reproduction (zero net investment).[26] When new fixed capital comes into existence, part of gross receipts are set aside in amortisation funds without any actual outlay being made on renewals. Then total demand falls short of equilibrium output, and the system runs into a slump. Contrariwise, when a burst of renewals falls due, in excess of the current rate of amortisation, a boom sets in. For equilibrium it is necessary for the age composition of the stock of capital to be such that current renewals just absorb current amortisation funds. Similarly, when accumulation is taking place, current investment must absorb current net saving.[27]

      It is in connection with the problem of effective demand, in this sense, that Marx brings gold-mining into the analysis. When real output expands at constant money prices, the increasing total of money value of output requires an increase in the stock of money in circulation (unless the velocity of circulation rises appropriately). The capitalists therefore have to devote part of their savings to increasing their holdings of cash (for there is no borrowing). This causes a deficiency of effective demand. But the increase in the quantity of money in circulation comes from newly mined gold, and the expenditure of the gold mining industry upon the other departments just makes up the deficiency in demand.[28]

      Rosa Luxemburg garbles this argument considerably, and brushes it away as beside the point. And it is beside the point that she is concerned with. She does not admit the savings and investment problem, for she takes it for granted that each individual act of saving out of surplus is accompanied by a corresponding amount of real investment, and that every piece of investment is financed by saving out of surplus of the same capitalist who makes it.[29] What she appears to be concerned with is rather the inducement to invest. What motive have the capitalists for enlarging their stock of real capital?[30] How do they know that there will be demand for the increased output of goods which the new capital will produce, so that they can ‘capitalise’ their surplus in a profitable form? (On the purely analytical plane her affinity seems to be with Hobson rather than Keynes.)

      Needless to say, our author does not formulate the problem of the inducement to invest in modern terminology, and the ambiguities and contradictions in her exposition have left ample scope for her critics to represent her theory as irredeemable nonsense.[31] But the most natural way to read it is also the clearest. Investment can take place in an ever-accumulating stock of capital only if the capitalists are assured of an ever-expanding market for the goods which the capital will produce. On this reading, the statement of the problem leads straightforwardly to the solution propounded in the third Section of this book.

      Marx has his own answer to the problem of inducement to invest, which she refers to in the first chapter.[32] The pressure of competition forces each individual capitalist to increase his capital in order to take advantage of economies of large-scale production, for if he does not his rivals will, and he will be undersold. Rosa Luxemburg does not discuss whether this mechanism provides an adequate drive to keep accumulation going, but looks for some prospective demand outside the circle of production. Here the numerical examples, as she shows, fail to help. And this is in the nature of the case, for (in modern jargon) the examples deal with ex post quantities, while she is looking for ex ante prospects of increased demand for commodities. If accumulation does take place, demand will absorb output, as the model shows, but what is it that makes accumulation take place?

      In Section II our author sets out to find what answers have been given to her problem. The analysis she has in mind is now broader than the strict confines of the arithmetical model. Technical progress is going on, and the output of an hour’s labour rises as time goes by. (The concept of value now becomes treacherous, for the value of commodities is continuously falling.) Real wages tend to be constant in terms of commodities, thus the value of labour power is falling, and the share of surplus in net income is rising (^s⁄_v, the rate of exploitation, is rising). The amount of saving in real terms is therefore rising (she suggests later that the proportion of surplus saved rises with surplus, in which case real savings increase all the more[33] ). The problem is thus more formidable than appears in the model, for the equilibrium rate of accumulation of capital, in real terms, is greater than in the model, where the rate of exploitation is constant. At the same time the proportion of constant to variable capital is rising. She regards this not as something which is likely to happen for technical reasons, but as being necessarily bound up with the very nature of technical progress. As productivity increases, the amount of producers’ goods handled per man-hour of labour increases; therefore, she says, the proportion of c to v must increase.[34] This is an error. It arises from thinking of constant capital in terms of goods, and contrasting it with variable capital in terms of value, that is, hours of labour. She forgets Marx’s warning that, as progress takes place, the value of the commodities making up constant capital also falls.[35] It is perfectly possible for productivity to increase without any increase in the value of capital per man employed. This would occur if improvements in the productivity of labour in making producers’ goods kept pace with the productivity of labour in using producers’ goods to make consumers’ goods (capital-saving inventions balance labour-saving inventions, so that technical progress is ‘neutral’). However, we can easily get out of this difficulty by postulating that as a matter of fact technical progress is mainly labour-saving, or, a better term, capital-using, so that capital per man employed is rising through time.

      Rosa Luxemburg treats the authors whom she examines in Section II with a good deal of sarcasm, and dismisses them all as useless. To some of the points raised her answers seem scarcely СКАЧАТЬ