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Yes, but that doesn't really answer my question of how the reduction in the mass of accumulated capital leads to a lowering of the OCC in new (or resumed) firms in the reconstruction phase though.Well, let's look at recent experience: the US auto makers, post 2007. 27 production plants were closed, employment levels cut by 1/3; wage tiers introduced so that those hired after 2008 made 50% less than those hired previous to that year; and work rules changed so that overtime no longer accrued after 8 hours in a day, but after 40 hours in a week.
Profitability restored.
What's the difference between that-- and torching 27 factories; sending 1/3 of your work force off to die; freezing wages, etc? Degree? Quantity? Duration?
I don't disagree that war can restore profitability through analogous measures to how US auto makers did in your example. The conventional view of the success of the German Wirtschaftswunder after the flattening of its industrial heartlands during WW2 (i.e. reconstructing industry with the latest most efficient technology available) follows roughly along the same lines.
My problem is this doesn't fit with the conventional picture of the tendential rise in the OCC causing a tendential fall in the rate of profit, leading to a period of crisis, It's the second part of the story, that the devalorisation of capital allows for the restoration of the profit rate, that I have a problem with.
Let's take a look at the measures Big Auto took - slashing wages and closing plants (shedding workers and fixed capital). The first measure is strategy of absolute surplus value (in volume 1 terms*) and does not affect the ratio of labour to constant cap per unit product - so unchanged OCC. However, if we make the not unreasonable assumption that there was a bias towards closing more unproductive plants and keeping open the more up to date, more efficient ones, that would increase unit productivity in the remaining (reduced) operation - which would (value composition of constant cap inputs unchanged) actually increase the OCC of the sector.
So what? Well, if the restoration of the profit rate has nothing to do with lowering the OCC (and seemingly linked to actually increasing it, at least at the level of individual corpos or sectors), then the rise of OCC can't be the source of the crisis in the first place. Really, in that case, you're talking about a periodic crisis of overaccumulation - which is not the same thing.
Bear in mind, I'm responding to my (possibly erroneous) reading of this section of the IP position doc
Capitalist society runs more and more on past labor (hardware and software). The pool of living labor, from which surplus value can be extracted, tendentially shrinks, despite the increasingly efficient fishing techniques. Tendentially, this leads to a relative decline of the production of new value [...]Still, capitalism cannot get rid of its crisis-tendencies. It can only overcome them through a massive devalorization of existing capital. It needs violent phases of destruction, either through depression or war, to restore conditions for new growth.
[I suspect "fishing" is a typo]
Which I interpret to being roughly equivalent to the position of Kliman, Freeman, et al, that the rising OCC, as outlined in (Engels' remixed) Volume 3, is the source of secular fall in the profit rate that can only be resolved by either terrible destruction of world war 3 (or socialist revolution). (And they make the further point that the great depression was only ended by the war, so it's not depression or war, but either war or depression and then war)
The problem with restating the crisis theory as a recurrent crisis of overaccumulation, from the orthodox anti-Bernsteinian point of view, is that other than requiring painful periods of devalorisation, it doesn't provide any final limit to, or historical crisis of, the capitalist mode of production as a whole.
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* this is arguable depending on your interpretation of the strict form of words used in volume 1 (i.e. formally just lengthening the working day, as opposed to wage cuts), but I tend to go with the general idea of relative surplus value being the specifically capitalist strategy that "revolutionises out and out the technical processes of labour, and the composition of society" via technological change - and the consequent increase in the technical composition of capital - i.e. less labour per unit produced.
Yeah, agree. That's a weird argument to make. Indeed, the argument should really be reversed. Use-values that are completely "destroyed" (used up) in consumption can actually accelerate the valorization process. There is a reason for the existence of planned obsolesence as it accelerates exchanges; the consumer has to re-buy the commodity much sooner than normal. Indeed, theoretically speaking, it does not matter if the use-value in the end is actually consumed. All that matters is that commodities are sold so that the surplus-value in them is realized. From a pure value point of view, the cycle of accumulation would continue uninterrupted.