Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Raya Dunayevskaya Archive

1910–1987

Raya Dunayevskaya Archive
“ Ours is the age that can meet the challenge of the times when we work out so new a relationship of theory to practice that the proof of the unity is in the Subject’s own self-development. Philosophy and revolution will first then liberate the innate talents of men and women who will become whole. Whether or not we recognise that this is the task history has ‘assigned’, to our epoch, it is a task that remains to be done.” New Passions, 1973
Biography
The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection - overview and index to Dunayevskaya's works (2.7Mb)
Works:
On the Resolution of the National Youth Committee, March 1934
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a Capitalist Society, 1941
An Analysis of Russian Economy, 1942
A Letter on Rosa Luxemburg and Capital Accumulation, 1943
Marxism against pseudo-Marxism, 1943
Introduction to Lenin, Origin of Capitalism in Russia, October 1943
A Restatement of Some Fundamentals of Marxism against ‘pseudo-Marxism’, November 1943
Can the law of value be uprooted?, 1944
A New Revision of Marxian Economics, 1944
Negro Intellectuals in Dilemna, 1944
Roosevelt Whitewashed at FEPC Meeting but Audience Senses Need for More Effective Action, February 1944
Marxism and Black liberation, June 1944
Negroes in the Revolution, 1945
Revision or Reaffirmation of Marxism?, 1945
Marxism and Political Economy, 1945
Harlem and Bilbo’s Party, October 1945
Luxemburg’s Theory of Accumulation. How it Differed with Marx and Lenin, 1946
New Developments in Stalin’s Russia, 1946
The Nature of the Russian Economy, 1946
The Decline in the Rate of Profit and The Theory of Crises, 1947
The fatal defect of capitalist production, 1947
A Letter to Natalia Trotsky on the Theory of State Capitalism, 1947
On Luxemburg’s Theory of Accumulation, April 1947
The Russian Question – A Debate (with Max Shachtman), May 1947
Uprooting capitalism’s law of value, part I, 1948
Uprooting capitalism’s law of value, part II, September 1948
Industrialization of the Negro, 1948
Production Statistics and the Devaluation of the Ruble, 1948
Stalinists Falsify Marxism Anew. Teaching Marxism in the Soviet Union, 1948
Translation of and Introduction to Plekhanov’s The Meaning of Hegel, 1949
A Bureaucrat’s Fate, 1949
The Case of Eugene Varga, 1949
The despotic plan of capital vs. freely associated labor, 1950
The Cooperative Form of Labor Vs. Abstract Labor, 1951
On the economic roots of imperialism: Rudolf Hilferding and ‘the stability of capitalismš”†¨, March 1951
The revolt of the workers and the plan of the intellectuals, Part I, June 1951
The revolt of the workers and the plan of the intellectuals, Part II, June 1951
The Beria Purge, 1953
The Evolution of a Social Type, 1953
German workers change face of Europe, 1953
Intellectuals and the Radical Workers, 1953
Malenkov Pledges H-Bomb and Caviar, 1953
Tensions Within The Soviet Union, 1953
The myth of the invincibility of totalitarianism, June 1953
Bert Cochran, Caucus Builder, 1954
The Gang Lawyer, 1954
On Both Sides of the Iron Curtain, 1954
Russia In Economic Crisis, 1954
Russia, More Than Ever Full of Revolutionaries ..., 1954
Russian Regime Cannot Afford a Beria Show Trial, 1954
Socialism or Barbarism, 1954
New Stage of Struggle Against Labor Bureaucracy, 1955
New Turn To The “Popular Front”, 1955
The Revolt In The Slave Labor Camps In Vorkuta, 1955
A response to [Cornelius] Castoriadis’s Socialism or Barbarism, August 1955
Marxism and the U.S. Civil War, November 1955
The Absence of a Mass Labor Party in the U.S., 1956
Death, Freedom and the Disintegration of Communism, 1956
Italian Communist Party Faces Revolt, December 8, 1956
Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Hungary, 1956
Where Is Russia Going?, 1956
Where to begin? Theory and practice in a new relationship, 1956
Without a Past And Without a Future, 1956
Djilas’ New Class, 1957
50 years after the revolution – Mao, Hegel, and dialectics in China, 1957
Mao Perverts Lenin, 1957
New Crisis in Russia, 1957
Russia’s Internal Crisis, 1957
Can humanity be free? The new Marxism and Freedom, May 1957
50 years after the revolution – Mao, Hegel, and dialectics in China, June 1957
The philosophic foundation of Marxism, June 1957
The American roots of Marxism, 1958
Colonial Revolts and the Creativity of People, 1958
Unemployment and Organizations to Fight It, 1958
Whither Paris?, 1958
Toward a new concept of organization, June 1958
The African Revolution, I, 1959
Eisenhower-Khrushchev Spectacular, 1959
Khrushchev Talks On And On, 1959
May 1 and the Shorter Work Day, 1959
The Cuban Revolution: The Year After, 1960
The Roots of Anti-Semitism, 1960
State Capitalism and the Bureaucrats, 1960
The World Crisis and the Theoretical Void, 1960
‘Philosophic foundations of the struggles for freedom’, October 1960
Notes on Hegel’s Logic, 1961
Revolutionary Dynamic of Hegel’s Thought (Written as a Letter to Olga Domanski), 1961
Rough Notes on Hegel’s Science of Logic, 1961
The New Russian Communist Manifesto, January 1961
African revolutions revisited, May 1961
Freedom Riders challenge homegrown totalitarianism, July 1961
Nuclear war and state-capitalism, July 1961
Spontaneity of Action and Organization of Thought, September 1961
Tito’s Turnabout, October 1961
If This Isn’t Madness, What Is It?, November 1961
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis tested anti-war Left, October 1962
Historic roots of conflict in South Asia, December 1962
American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard, 1963
Racism and the birth of imperialism, 100 years after the Spanish-American war, 1963
The uniqueness of Marxist-Humanism, 1963
To Fromm on the Dialectic, November 1963
The Theory of Alienation: Marx’s Debt to Hegel, 1964
The Free Speech Movement and the Negro Revolution, 1965
Marx’s Humanism Today, 1965
Ramifications of Watts revolt, September 1965
Marx’s humanism and the mass struggles since World War II, December 1965
Recollections of Leon Trotsky, December 1965
Hegel’s summons: Grasp revolutionary spirit of the age, January 1966
Revisiting ‘Black Power,’ Race and Class, September 1966
Tragedy of China’s Cultural Revolution, October 1966
The double tragedy of Che Guevara, 1967
Revisiting ‘Black Power,’ Race and Class, 1967
Economic reality and dialectics of liberation, 1968
The near-revolution of France, 1968: Why did it fail?, 1968
Murder and war in the uncivilized U.S., May 1968
Practicing Philosophy and Revolution, May 1968
Recollecting the legacy of ‘Socialism with a human face’, August 1968
From Marx to Marxist-Humanism, 1969
From the Black-Red Conference: Dialectics of the freedom movements, January 1969
Marxist-Humanism’s concept of ‘Subject’, 1971
Women’s liberation, then and now, 1971
Praxis and the responsibility of intellectuals, July 1971
On C.L.R. James’ Notes on Dialectics, 1972
The dialectic of Marx’s Grundrisse, 1973
Dialectics and the Black dimension, 1973
A Letter on Marxist-Humanism’s concept of ‘Subject’, 1973
Philosophy & Revolution, 1973
Remembering Allende, 1973, September 1973
Today’s Epigones Who Try to Truncate Marx’s Capital, 1974
Marx’s Grundrisse and women’s liberation, March 1974
Black dimension in women’s liberation, 1975
Practicing Proletarian Reason. On seniority and labor’s emancipation, 1975
Remembering the 1974–75 Portuguese Revolution and its relation to Africa, 1976
Marxist-Humanism’s original contribution, April 1976
Marx’s concept of ‘labor’, May 1976
Dialectics: The Algebra of Revolution, 1978
Global capital’s structural crisis and the need to return to Marx’s Capital, 1978
The philosophic legacy of Karel KosĆ­k, 1978
Grave contradictions of 1979 Iranian Revolution, 1979
Outline of Marx’s Capital, Volume I, 1979
Rosa Luxemburg: revolutionary, feminist, 1979
In celebration of Women’s History Month – Lessons of the Iranian revolution, March 1979
International Women’s Day and Iran, March 1979
The Two Russian Revolutions, and Once Again, on the Theory of Permanent Revolution, October 1979
What is philosophy? What is revolution? What is anti-imperialism?, December 1979
Marxism and ‘the party’, 1980
On the anniversary of the birth of Erich Fromm, 1980
Women and revolution in Iran, 1980
May Day as a birthtime of history, April 1980
Historic Roots of Israel-Palestine conflict, September 1980
Women and revolution in Iran, September 1980
What has happened to the Iranian revolution?, 1981
Revolution and counter-revolution in Iran, June 1981
Marxist-Humanism’s relation to Marx’s Humanism, September 1981
East European revolt and the re-creation of Marx’s Marxism, February 1982
Stop the slaughter of the Palestinians!, September 1982
Marx and the Black World, 1983
Marx’s Unchaining of the Dialectic, 1983
Marx’s unchaining of the dialectic, January 1983
American Civilization on Trial (4th Edition), August 1983
LĆ©vi-Strauss and the battle of ideas, August 1983
Foundations of Marxist-Humanism, August 1983
Lesson of Grenada for today, November 1983
Counter-revolution from within revolution: the problem of our times, April 1984
Dialectics of revolution: American roots and world Humanist concepts, part I, March 1985
Dialectics of revolution: American roots and world Humanist concepts, part II, March 1985
When News & Letters was born, March 1985
Marx’s new moments and those in our age, April 1986
Another look at Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, June 1986
The Philosophic Moment Marxist-Humanism, January 1987
‘On political divides and philosophic new beginnings’, June 1987
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Further reading:
On The Woman Question: An Orientation, by Selma James, 1951
Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts
Lenin’s Annotations on Hegel’s Logic
C.L.R. James Archive
A Marxian Oddity — Review of Dunayevskaya by Paul Mattick, 1958
Erich Fromm Archive


[PDF]

The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection - Marxists Internet Archive


https://www.marxists.org › archive › dunayevskaya › guide
Aug 10, 2017 - Revolution to "The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection: Retrospective and ... The analysis of Russian state-capitalism had led, in 1941, to her association with ... link to PDF file: http://rayadunayevskaya.org/ArchivePDFs/49.pdf.

Raya Dunayevskaya Papers - Walter P. Reuther Library


https://reuther.wayne.edu › files


of the Age. - to Section II Revolution and Counter-Revolution: Where do we go from here? ... Volume XIV: The Writing of Raya Dunayevskaya's “Trilogy of Revolution”. 1953-1983- The ... showed that Russia was a. state-capitalist society. The seminal ... t~.on on the relation of fascisiU to the possibility bf proletarian reyolution.

Nigel Gibson Review Article Raya Dunayevskaya's Marxist ...


https://dalspace.library.dal.ca › handle › dalrev_vol68_iss3_pp357_365

by N Gibson - ‎1988
Consciousness, Marcuse's Reason and Revolution, Korsch's Marxism ... as a "bacillus" for the proletarian revolution. ... Stalinist counter-revolution had destroyed the Russian revolution and transformed it into its opposite-state capitalism. Furthermore, this state capitalism (Dunayevskaya's original analysis of Russia as a.
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=%09+Raya+Dunayevskaya
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On the economic roots of imperialism, Hilferding and 'the stability of capitalism'


NEWS & LETTERS, JULY 2003

From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Marxist-Humanist Archives

EDITOR'S NOTE
After the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq this year, revolutionaries are discussing imperialism in the age of state-capitalism and ways to challenge it. It is a central topic in the Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives (see "II. State-capitalism and imperialism"). For that reason, we reprint part of a letter from Raya Dunayevskaya to C.L.R. James, of March 2, 1951. In it Dunayevskaya discusses, critically, the Marxist theories of imperialism in the first generation after Marx. The letter has been edited for publication and the title and notes are the editors'. The original is in THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, 9291-98.
* * *
We must now tie up the intelligentsia and the labor bureaucracy with the Plan. Thus far we have not done so concretely enough. We spoke of the Plan as the enemy, but we did not split the category of planners into a strict relation to the specific epoch for which they planned. We spoke of the labor bureaucracy as the same nature as Stalinism, both resulting from the stage of state-capitalism, but no internal connection flowed from all of this. Not in any truly concrete sense. So I will now split up that category [of] planners and see whether we can get closer to the internal logic.
With the end of classical political economy we have the first planner appearing in Jean Charles Leonard Sismondi. He tried to stop the march of industry, of constant capital outdistancing variable capital. Thus the doubts of bourgeois classicism got embodied in a bourgeois representative.(1)
The doubts grow with the “unconscious” development of capitalist production, and petty-bourgeois socialism appears--first in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with his BANK aid program, and then with Ferdinand Lassalle, with his demand for STATE aid to “cooperative production societies.”
The opposite of their intentions is thus clearly seen in their program, for in truth each tries to be a better bourgeois than the bourgeoisie itself--one by “abolishing” money but all wrapped up in the fetishism of commodities [Proudhon], the other by “extending” cooperation and all wrapped up with the fetishism of the state as some sort of classless arbiter [Lassalle].(2)
Proudhon is the last of the representatives of the epoch of competitive capitalism.  Lassalle is the anticipator of monopoly capitalism (that’s really what HIS cooperative form of labor is), or more precisely yet, the statification of industry AND of life. Both are rejected by the further development of capitalism. With the transformation of competitive into monopoly capitalism, the BOURGEOISIE itself becomes the planners and the results of their planning are: trusts, international cartels, IMPERIALISM.
The new petty-bourgeoisie strata--which has also been transformed into its opposite, from the laisse-faire small grocery man into the ADMINISTRATIVE CLERK of the trusts--begins to ask for a saner “policy.” But these are much [less] dangerous than the Proudhons and Lassalles, for the very development of capitalism so engulfs them, they do not even know the “vocabulary” of the proletariat, and the latter does not listen to them at all.
The real danger comes from WITHIN scientific socialism--Rudolf Hilferding(3), the orthodox [Marxist], not Eduard Bernstein(4), the revisionist. Hilferding sees the new stage of capitalism in its financial razzle-dazzle appearance and becomes enamored of its capacity to “unify” commercial, industrial, and financial interests [instead of being] concretely aware of the greater contradictions and antagonisms of the new monopoly stage of capitalism.
I wish to stress the seeming orthodoxy of Hilferding. No one, absolutely no one--not the firebrand Rosa Luxemburg, nor the strict realist V.I. Lenin, and I dare say not Hilferding himself--knew that what he was doing with his theory of finance capitalism was bringing in the first theory of retrogressionism [into Marxism]....Even with over four decades of hindsight, and much, hard thinking on the subject, I have first now realized that what Hilferding was SEEING and analyzing (and it took Nikolai Bukharin’s theory of the transition period to bring it home to me)(5) was the STABILITY OF CAPITALISM.
Watch the orthodoxy though: Hilferding is proposing no revisionism. The automatic fall of capitalism is still expected and the inevitability of socialism in a mechanistic sort of way is also held to tightly. BUT rather than seeing monopoly as a transition into opposite of a previous stage, monopoly is treated more like simple large-scale production. THAT IS THE KEY. For if it is not a transition into opposite of a fundamental attribute of capitalism, then CAPITALISM’S ORGANIZATION and centralization, monopolization’s appearance as the “emergence of SOCIAL control”...is in fact superseded socialism. Or more precisely, [Hilferding] retrogresses back to home base: the equilibrium of capitalist production.
By viewing the whole development of trusts and cartels not from within the factory, but from “society,” that is, the market, Marx’s general law of capitalist accumulation--the DEGRADATION of the proletariat along with capitalist accumulation--has no meaning for Hilferding. Neither does Marx’s postulate “private production without the control of private property” make any imprint on Hilferding.(6) And of course labor remains a unity; there is not any inkling of an aristocracy of labor arising out of the monopolization and degradation and imperialism.
You must remember that even with the outbreak of World War I, but before Lenin did his own analysis [of imperialism in 1915], he introduced Bukharin’s WORLD ECONOMY AND IMPERIALISM which said pretty much the same thing as Hilferding. All this I want to repeat again and again in order to emphasize the orthodoxy, in order to show that [even when] all the formulae are adhered to the loss of revolutionary perspective not yet in a positive way but in the negative of awe before the EXISTENT, continued capitalism can be very, very deceiving. If it was [deceiving] to Lenin we better watch it all the time.
What in truth emerges from a close study of Hilferding...is that the new generation of Marxists following Engels’ death [in 1895], placed within growing, centralized production, SAW MONOPOLY NOT AS A FETER BUT RATHER AS AN ORGANIZING FORCE OF PRODUCTION. So that the Second International, which had openly rejected Bernsteinism and gradualness, accepted Hilferdingism. That meant tacit acceptance of the capacity of capital to gain a certain “stability,” to modify its anarchism as a “constant” feature. They saw in [this] new stage not a TRANSITION to a higher form, but something in itself already higher, although “bad.”
Now the person who made this all clear to me was Bukharin, that logical extension of Hilferding, blown into the THEORY of counter-revolution right within the first workers’ state. It is to him that we must turn. Here too for our generation it is correct to view him with hindsight, precisely because his is “only” theory that will become full-blown actual counter-revolution with Stalin supplying it an objective base.
Keep in mind therefore the three actual stages of capitalist production for the three decades since the publication of Bukharin’s ECONOMICS OF THE TRANSITIONAL PERIOD:
l) 1920-30: Taylorism plus Fordism, that is, the discovery of the [assembly] belt line and with it the necessity for a fascistic order in the factory. It may be “vulgar” to call gangsters part of the intelligentsia, but that is the genuine face of “social control” when the masses themselves do not control [production]. Marx’s view of the planned despotism plus the industrial ARMY of managers, foreman, etc. has moved from theory to such EVERYDAY practice that every worker knows it in his bones; he needs no ghost come from the grave to tell him THAT....
2) 1930-40: General crisis; New Dealism where “everybody” allegedly administers, and fascism where openly only the elite do, both in mortal combat with the CIO and the general sit-down strikes (which made a true joke of private property) for “social control.” Plan, plan, plans: National Five-Year Plans in Russia, Germany, Japan; John Maynard Keynes, the New Deal, technocracy, the Tennessee Valley Authority, public works.
3) 1940-50: Monopolization has been transformed into its opposite, statification. (What greater scope for a modern Moliere, to take those weighty volumes of the Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC)(7) proving monopolization and how strangling it is, and then on the eve of World War II they are finally published in full, prefaced by a call for full mobilization which shows that monopolization plus Hitlerism is child’s play as compared to American statification.)
End of World War II, “end” of fascism and state-private-monopoly rule. Complete state-capitalism reaching its tentacles from Russia into Eastern Europe, engulfing Britain, seeping into Western Europe and peering out of the U.S. TOTAL, GLOBAL PLANS: Marshall, Molotov, Monnet, Schumann, Truman’s Point 4.(8) Keynes is dead; long live the state plan. The intelligentsia in Russia, the Social Democratic labor bureaucracy elsewhere, all in mortal combat with the Resistance, with the Warsaw [uprising](9), with general strikes and colonial revolutions. One strangles the revolution “for” the masses’ own good, and the other for “democracy’s” shadow.
NOTES
1. Jean Charles Leonard Sismondi (1773-1842) was an early critic of industrialism. His NEW PRINCIPLES OF POLICTICAL ECONOMY (1819) proposed state regulation of the economy in order to create a balance between production and consumption. Karl Marx made critical notes on Sismondi in 1844.
2. For more on Proudhon (1809-65), a founder of anarchism, and on Lassalle (1825-69), whom Marx called a future worker’s dictator, and several others noted here, see Dunayevskaya’s MARXISM AND FREEDOM, FROM 1776 UNTIL TODAY.
3. Rudolf Hilferding (1877-1941) was a leading theoretician of the “orthodox Marxist” Second International. He is best known for FINANCE CAPITAL, which argued that the influence of banks over industry led to monopolies and consequently to imperialism. He opposed the German Social-Democrats’ vote for war credits in 1914, though he took a centrist position as a leader of the Independent Social-Democratic Party. In 1923 and 1928 he served as Finance Minister in two German Social-Democratic governments. He was murdered by the Nazis in Paris in 1941.
4. Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) was the founder of revisionist Marxism who rejected the notion of the inevitable collapse of capitalism and the seizure of power by the proletariat.
5. Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) was a leading theoretician of the Russian Bolsheviks. He wrote ECONOMICS OF THE TRANSITIONAL PERIOD in 1920. Though Stalin utilized some of ideas in his rise to power, Bukharin was executed on Stalin’s orders in 1938.
6. This is probably a paraphrase of Marx’s comment that the concentration and centralization of capital leads to “the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the mode of capitalism itself....It is private production unchecked by private ownership” See CAPITAL, Vol. III, trans. by David Fernbach (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 569.
7. The Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC) reports were a series of studies commissioned by Congress which studied the concentration of economic power in the U.S. economy.
8. General George Marshall was the U.S. Secretary of State under Truman who devised the Marshall Plan for the recovery of Europe after World War II. V. M. Molotov (1890-1986) was Soviet Foreign Minister from 1939-49 and 1953-56.  Jean Monnet (1888-1979) headed French economic planning after World War II and was a guiding force in the creation of the European Common Market, the precursor of the European Union. Robert Schumann (1886-1963), French Foreign Minister during the late 1940s and early 1950s, devised the Schumann Plan in 1950 to place French and German coal and steel production under a single joint authority. This later became the foundation of the Common Market. Truman’s Point 4, unveiled in 1949, was an effort to “combat Communism” by promising aid to underdeveloped nations.
9. This refers to the Polish uprising against the Nazis in Warsaw in 1944. Though the Russian army was outside Warsaw at the time, Stalin refused to extend any aid to the uprising and allowed the Nazis to crush it.
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Raya Dunayevskaya

The Decline in the Rate of Profi
and The Theory of Crises

(1947)

Editor’s Note: This discussion by Raya Dunayevskaya of Marx’s critique of capitalist production consists of excerpts from the first draft of what became her first book, MARXISM AND FREEDOM – a manuscript entitled State-Capitalism and Marxism, written in 1947. The original can be found in THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, microfilm no. 472.
Proofed & corrected: Dawn Gaitis, 2006.
Volume III [of Capital], which deals with the phenomena of capitalism in their concrete movements, is the one which is preferred by present-day academic economists. These tell us that it is only from this vantage point, where Marx deals with prices and profits, that one can understand Volume I where he deals only in abstractions: value and surplus value. MARX’S POINT WAS THE EXACT OPPOSITE. He maintained that once you understand the law of surplus value, the law of profit would present no difficulty; if you reversed the process, you could understand neither the one nor the other.
It is true that Volume III is Marx’s nearest approximation to the real world. Commodities are seen to exchange not at value, but at prices of production, that is, cost of production plus average rate of profit. Furthermore, surplus value does not remain an abstract mass of congealed unpaid labor, but assumes the palpable shape of profit, interest and rent – all in the form of liquid capital. The merchant and his middleman’s profit and the financier and his transactions and credit manipulations all come to life. What, however, is lost sight of by those who think that this shows that in Volume III common sense has triumphed over the Hegelian mysticism of Volume I, is that none of the laws enunciated in the latter is abrogated in the former. The laws, modified in their actual operation, may not, through the intervention of counteracting tendencies, ever reach their ultimate limit, but none of these laws is controverted.
Surplus value remains a GIVEN magnitude, the congelation of so many unpaid hours of labor, which serves as the straitjacket of capitalists, which they cannot get out of by any market manipulations. All that competition can accomplish is to effect a general rate of profit, a sort of “capitalist communism” which assures that all capitals of given magnitudes receive corresponding shares of the total surplus value.
The transformation of the rate of surplus value into the rate of profit is merely the expression of the ratio of surplus value to total, instead of only to variable, capital. But this in no way changes the law of surplus value, which is that only living labor is creative of surplus value. Individual prices oscillate above or below value, but, in their totality, all prices are equal to all values. Monopoly also brings a modification into the operation of the average rate of profit, but that is not the dominant law of capitalist production.
The dominant law of capitalist production – and the heart of Volume III – is the Law of the Falling Tendency of the Rate of Profit. Marx considered the theory of the declining rate of profit the “PONS ASINI” of the whole of political economy, that which divides one theoretic system from another.
The constant revolutions in production and the constant expansion of constant capital necessitate, of course, an extension of the market. But the enlargement of the market in a capitalist nation has very precise limits. The consumption goods of a capitalist nation are limited by the luxuries of the capitalists and the necessities of the workers when paid at value. The market for consumption goods is just sufficient to allow the capitalist to continue his search for greater value. IT CANNOT BE LARGER.
This is the supreme manifestation of Marx’s simplifying assumption that the worker is paid at value. The innermost cause of crises, according to Marx, is that labor power IN THE PROCESS OF PRODUCTION AND NOT IN THE MARKET, creates a value greater than it itself is. The worker is a producer of overproduction. It cannot be otherwise in a value-producing society where the means of consumption, being but a moment in the reproduction of labor power, cannot be bigger than the needs of capital for labor power. This is the fatal defect of capitalist production. On the one hand, the capitalist must increase his market. On the other hand, it cannot be larger. This is what Marx calls THE GENERAL LAW OF CAPITALISM which cannot be overcome other than by the abrogation of the law of value.
The only “market” that enlarges beyond the limits of the working population paid at value is the capital market. But there too the constant technological revolutions make the time necessary to REPRODUCE a product tomorrow less than the time to PRODUCE it today. Hence there comes a time when all commodities, including labor power, are “overpaid.”
The crisis that follows is not caused by a shortage of “effective demand.” On the contrary, it is the crisis that causes a shortage of “effective demand.” The worker employed yesterday has become unemployed today. A crisis occurs not because there has been a scarcity of markets – the market is largest just before the crisis – but because FROM THE CAPITALIST VIEWPOINT there is occurring an unsatisfactory distribution of “income” between recipients of wages and those of surplus value or profits. The capitalist decreases his investments and the resulting stagnation of production appears as overproduction. Of course, there is a contradiction between production and consumption. Of course there is the “inability to sell.” But that “inability to sell” manifests itself as such BECAUSE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL ANTECEDENT DECLINE IN THE RATE OF PROFIT WHICH HAS NOTHING WHATEVER TO DO WITH THE INABILITY TO SELL. The decline in the rate of profit, which proves that capitalist production creates a barrier to its own further development, is what causes competition, not vice versa.
The law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit is the expression of the law of value under the most advanced conditions of capitalist production. Under these conditions the ever greater preponderance of dead over living labor brings about such a falling relation of surplus value to total capital that a day might come when, even if the capitalist could appropriate all 24 hours of labor of the EMPLOYED army, and the laborers lived on air, the capitalist could not get SUFFICIENT surplus value to run the mammoth capitalist machine on an ever-expanding scale. The general contradiction of capitalism thus reaffirms the three principal facts of capitalist production: (1) decline in the rate of profit, (2) deeper and deeper crises, and (3) a greater and greater unemployed army.
Today, when we see the fruition of the most abstract postulates of Marx – the concentration of capital in the hands of one single capitalist or one single capitalist corporation – we can see that the absolute limit of development of the law of centralization and concentration of capital has in no way been able to solve the problem of crises and the declining rate of profit. The given single capitalist society remains dominated by the law of value, the law of the world market, having its origin in technological revolutions no matter where they originate. Atomic energy may be the secret discovery of the United States. But Russia must follow suit or perish ...
One section of Theories of Surplus Value, entitled Accumulation of Capital and Crises ... is of particular pertinence to today’s discussion. ... Marx’s critique of Malthus, for example, is also the answer to the underconsumptionists of today.
“The only merit of Malthus,” wrote Marx in 1865, “is that he emphasized the uneven exchange between capital and labor. This merit is negated thanks to his confusion between the determination of value (VERWERTUNG) of money or commodity AS CAPITAL with the value (WERT) of the commodity as such ...
“The condition of overproduction is the general law of production of capital: production proceeds in accordance with the productive forces...and disregards the existing limits of the market, effective demand...besides, the mass of producers is limited and, because of the nature of capitalist production, must always remain limited ...”
In contrasting classical political economy with “vulgar” economics, Marx comes to conclusions which cannot be overestimated for our day. He contends that finance capital theorists are so far removed from the direct process of production, live so fully in the fetishistic realm of interest, that they have produced theories of money and credit which are nothing short of “a fiction without fantasy.”
The fact that this very important work has been wholly neglected in the United States by Marxists and non-Marxists alike does not lessen, but heightens, the interest in it by scholars and the public alike.
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Last updated on 10 June 2017


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Marx @ 200: Debating Capitalism & Perspectives for the Future of Radical Theory
Lara Monticelli
Lara Monticelli
Christian Fuchs
The special issue features a debate between David Harvey & Michael Hardt/Toni Negri on the relevance of Marx today, contributions by Silvia Federici on feminism and Marxism, Slavoj Žižek on the future of radical change, Erik Olin Wright on the necessity to transcend capitalism, Lara Monticelli on alternatives to capitalism and prefigurative social movements, Christian Fuchs on Marxian theory of communication and many other excellent contributions  as well as the first English translation of a text by Rosa Luxemburg on Karl Marx and a review of Sven-Eric Liedman's new Marx-biography.

All articles are freely downloadable, and you can also download a single PDF file containing all the contributions from the link above.

With contributions by : David Harvey, Michael Hardt/Toni Negri, Christian Fuchs, Silvia Federici, Slavoj Žižek, Erik Olin Wright, Lara Monticelli, Friederike Beier, Wayne Hope, Todd Wolfson & Peter Funke, Joss Hands, Peter McLaren & Petar Jandrić, Ingo Schmidt, Bahar Kayıhan, Joff P.N. Bradley & Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Paul O'Connell, Chihab El Khachab, Franklin Dmitryev & Eugene Gogol, Bryant William Sculos, Leila Salim Leal, Paul Reynolds, Ben Whitham, Rosa Luxemburg.
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