Date: Wed, 6 Mar 96 15:06:12 GMT
From: Adam Rose <adam-AT-pmel.com>
Subject: Re: "Value Pump"


 
But Hugh, Marx and you are using a similar analysis to go in different
directions.

You, in your previous post on the subject, gave the impression that certain
sectors of the economy ( services, agriculture ) are permanently prone to a lower
organic composition of capital than others ( manufacturing , chemicals ).

Your choice of metaphor, a pump, is a fairly permanent object, after all.
 
Yet Marx, in the passage you quote, is arguing precisely the opposite ie
that in as far as an economy is suited to capitalist production, the
investment tends to flow towards those sectors where a temporarily low
organic composition of capital holds. 

Surely this investment will raise the organic composition of capital in that
sector ?

Surely this is what we have seen in eg the retail sector ?

How do you explain the EC food mountains, the simultaneous depopulation
of the countryside, and the growing population, if not by arguing that there
has been a massive increase in the organic composition of capital ?

The last time I flew from Phoenix to Chicago, I couldn't believe how
few houses I saw - this indicates a high organic composition of capital
to me. 

Financial services seem to me to have a very high organic composition of
capital - they are extremely high tech, with a very proletarianised
workforce.

And finally, it is very hard to actually determine the real organic composition
of capital in any particular industry, because prices do not reflect values
very directly. The price of labour is partly a reflection of the state of the
class struggle between capital and labour - and the price of fertiliser is
also partly the result of the relative power of farmers versus the agro 
chemical business, as mediated by the state.

Perhaps low + high pressure systems in the earth's atmosphere would be a
better metaphor - or even a pot of boiling water !

Adam.

Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK

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