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What does it mean to be a left wing economist today? |
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Page 9 of 38
I will further discuss the alleged instability of capitalism, and its alleged tendency to prepare the way for its own Aufhebung (replacement by a higher form of social organization which keeps its merits and corrects its defects) in the course of outlining Rosa Luxemburg´s theory of the accumulation of capital below. However, first I want to point out that the same basic diagram
M ---> C .......... P ............ C´ ---> M`
suggests reasons for believing that capitalism will never come to an end. In the diagram the movement from M to M´, the investment of money for the purpose of getting more money back, is the only reason why P happens. Profit is the purpose of production. But if there is no production, then the workers have no jobs; the consumers have no products to consume, no food to eat, no clothes to wear, no houses to live in; the governments have no income to tax, and therefore no money to pay the army and the police.
Consequently, whatever needs to be done to keep the rate of profit up, so that capitalists will keep investing, must be done, and therefore it will be done. There must be what the French school of “regulationist” economists calls a “regime of accumulation.” That is to say, there must be some combination of economics, politics, and culture that makes it possible for the process of capital accumulation to continue. It may require wars; it may require a mass culture that makes women feel suicidal if they do not conform to the ideal of beauty promoted by the beauty products industry; it may require fascism; it may require a military dictatorship that tortures and kills labor leaders in order to create a favorable business climate for investors; it may require suburbs, tax breaks for home ownership, freeways, and cheap petroleum. Keeping going the production everybody depends on may or may not require any of these things at any given time and place, but it does require some regime of accumulation or other. The fundamental dynamics of capitalism cannot be changed. Any movement in the direction of socialism will weaken the profit motive. Since everybody’s livelihood depends on keeping the profit motive strong, movements toward change in a socialist direction will be repressed and reversed.
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