From: SUBTILE-AT-aol.com
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 94 12:17:28 EDT
Subject: Re: Labor, Surplus value, catastrophism


The debate on the principle of the tendential decline in the rate of profit
has been interesting to me, a non-economist, in terms of whether marxists
still think that capitalism is crisis-ridden enough to eventually collapse
and be superseded by either incipient socialism or a reversion to
precapitalism.  But one thing mentioned in Hans Ehrbar's post of Monday 25
July piques me -- why did nobody else respond to the problem, as he describes
it:

"Marx was too concerned with the autosubversion
of capitalism, and did not foresee that capitalism would ever become
so entrenched that it could run up against the ecological limits of
our earth.  The labor theory of value postulates that the forces which
govern the capitalist economy are not reducible to individual
intentions but Marx called value an "automatic subject".  There seems
to be widespread optimism that it will be possible to wean the world
economy of its addiction to growth and profit before it is too late.
I do not share this optimism."

Do the rest of you assume that capitalism will never exhaust the resource
base and that there is no possibility of its being terminated by an
ecological crisis?
-Samuel Day Fassbinder



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