The hypothesis of today’s insuperable immanent barriers to capitalist production and a discussion of some its implications

The length of the global economic and financial crisis has slowly seen the start of a discussion on the future of capitalist production, on whether capitalism has reached the end of its” use-by date”. Roberts (2016, chapter 13). The issue is that of the system’s capacity for expanded reproduction on the basis of its historically determined social relationships of production and laws of motion. I will approach the question through the proposition famously made by Marx in chapter 15 of volume 3 of Capital that “capitalist production seeks continually to overcome its immanent barriers, but overcomes them only by means that set up the barriers afresh and on a more powerful scale”. The examination of whether capitalism is reaching a point where it will no longer be able to overcome even temporarily these barriers involves two different terrains. The first is quite classical. In the setting of the full “establishment of the world market” and the impossibility of outward expansion to a yet in-completed world market, still topical at the time of Grossman’s formulation of the breakdown theory (1929), the barriers to be overcome are really and fully immanent. They pertain to the factors commanding the movement of the rate of profit and so the amount of surplus value created in production, as determined by the organic composition of capital. Today the key issue is whether the increase in the rate of exploitation of variable capital and the fall in the price of constant capital are strong enough to offset the scale of the present and future substitution of capital for labour through robotisation. The issue was raised by Mandel with respect to what he named “robotism” as early as 1986 (Preface to Capital vol. 3 in the Penguin Edition) but never discussed. Today the discussion cannot be put off. I argue that due to the effective increase in labour substitution, a high degree of insufficiency in the amount of appropriable surplus value, e.g. surplus value produced and realized, underlies the crisis. The second issue is that of the hither forth centrality for the future of capitalist production of resource depletion and inaction in the face of the speed and implications of global warming. We cannot continue to leave ecological Marxists take care of the issue, capitalism’s “second contradiction” (O’Connor, 1988) being still read by many Marxist economists as a “secondary” one. The aggregate behaviour of corporations as determined by their call on energy and raw materials and the imperative to produce and sell commodities with exchange but not use value demands that capital’s “heedless” race to ecological crisis if not catastrophe be treated by economists as rigorously as the data permits. The “first contradiction” must in turn be correctly defined, namely reformulated along the line just set out. It is not one of overproduction. The fact that capitalism’s capacity for expanded reproduction on the basis of its historically determined social relationships of production and laws of motion is severely threatened, if not already impaired, will not jeopardize its existence as a system of social and political domination. But it will pose the bourgeoisie accentuated problems including the maintenance of social stability and “civil peace” in a context of permanent structural unemployment or again in coping with the ever-increasing migratory movements over the world. It heralds an accentuation of barbarism but does it for concrete perspectives of socialism in opposition? Are not revolutionaries faced with an issue which neither Marx nor Engels nor the great revolutionary theoreticians contemplated, that of the “non-supersession of capitalism” even as it brings civilization down along with its own slow collapse? In the last chapter of Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism Lenin talked of “private economic and private property relations (as) constituting a shell which no longer fits its contents, a shell which must inevitably decay if its removal is artificially delayed, a shell which may remain in a state of decay for a fairly long period (if, at the worst, the cure of the opportunist abscess is protracted), but which will inevitably be removed.” Even if revolutionaries cannot be too sure about this, they cannot remain passive. Their responsibility is that of rethinking the formulation and articulation of their program. It will necessarily be defensive but must less than ever remain simply national.