Date: Sun, 14 May 1995 18:02:26 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (jones/bhandari)
Subject: Re: Moral depreciation


 As I understand it, moral depreciation is not fundamentally a problem of
technological change or falling profitability: it is from this category
that Marx derives powerful tendencies towards the intensification of labor
and the increasing misery of the working class (in fact the passages
reproduced from Jerry indicate this). 
John Ernst wrote: 

>  Any capitalist will tell you 
>about how they have to write-off the value of capital equipment as a 
>result of forced obsolescence.  Personal computers are an illustration of 
>this process that all members of this list should be able to understand.  
>If you purchased a computer a few years ago it has already become 
>obsolete even though the use value embodied in the computer has not been 
>used up.  The process of competition, according to Marx, brings about 
>this "moral depreciation" and results in lost capital values for 
>capitalists and "closetware" for us.

 Moral depreciation is also a powerful source of the intensification of
labor:"The material consumption of the machinery, which represents a large
capital value and which must be depreciated and have interest paid on it,
does not only occur through use, but also through its non-use, as a result
of the destructive effects of the natural elements.  This explains the
capitalists' tendency to make work continue day and night, a tendency
reinforced by the fact that every new invensiton threatens to devalue the
machinery; hence the capitalists' striving to minimize the danger of the
'moral' wear and tear of the machinery by reducing the period in which it
produces its total value. 'Hence too the economic paradox that the most
powerful instrument for reducing labour-time suffers a dialectical
inversion and becomes the most unfailing means of turning the whole
lifetime of the worker and his family into labour-time at capital's
disposal for its own valorization." H Grossmann quoting Marx in his Marx,
the Classical Political Economy, and the Problem of Dynamics, Capital and
Class 2 (Summer 1977)

Grossmann takes the accounting problem of depreciation allowances back into
the hidden abode of production. 

Moreover, it may be possible to connect the threat of the depreciation of
ever-larger capital values with the compulsive intensification of labor at
a late stage of capitalism.  

The point would be that the increasing misery thesis would not be based on
the empirical realities of early capitalism (destruction of artisans and
peasantry with a too slow pace of accumulation to absorb the displaced)but
on a theoretical analysis of the tendencies of capital accumulation. The
real question would then be how in responding to the threat of depreciation
does capital attempt in the face of working class resistance to adequate
the labor process to the self-expansion of value; what becomes the nature
of the concrete labor done by the proletariat? 

Rakesh  
 



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