Accumulation and Technology

Steindl, Josef

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Document type:: Works

Collection:: Josef Steindl Collection

Title:: Accumulation and Technology: Exemplar 2

Author:: Steindl, Josef

Scope:: Typoskript, 25 Blätter, mit zahlreichen handschriftlichen Anstreichungen

Year of publication:: 1984

Source material date:: [vermutlich um/vor 1984]

Note:: Exemplar 2 (Exemplar 1 mit anderen handschriftlichen Anmerkungen siehe AL00656752).

Shelfmark:: S/M.5.2

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.48671/nls.js.AC14446022

7 with "home production" or cottage industries, both at home and overseas. This would apply to early stages of the industrial revolution. But the Marxian argument can be detached completely from the wage mechanism: If the sabour scarcity is strong enough to be experienced directly, i.e. if it is difficult to find labour, then it will tend to enforce labour saving methods independently of any consideration of wage cost. No doubt it acted in this way in the period of full employment in the post-war decades. This period illustrates very well the Marxian story of a powerful accumulation breaking a path for itselfby opening new sources of supply of labour ( agriculture, women, foreign workers ) and by forcing the path of productivity increase through new methods. The role of technical progress as just described is essential for the functioning of the Marxian law of accumulation. This law states that the rise in wages ( and therefore the distribution of incomes) is constrained by the requirements(or necessities) of accumulation: " The .... law of c aicumuiaiion says in fact only that by its nature accumulation excludes any decrease in thedegree of exploitation or any rise in the price of labour such as could endanger seriously the steady reproduction of capital and its reproduction on a continuously expanding scale." ( p.652-653 ) The rate of accumulation is assumed to be given, presumably, as argued above, exogenously or historically determined. The major importance of this law of accumulation is evident from the fact that Marx uses it in place of the classical law of population which he discarded. Since he did not recognize

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