ACCUMULATION AND TECHNOLOGY 
Parallels and Contrasts 
Karl Marx was one of the few economists who had something 
useful to say about technical progress.This comes from 
his interest in the long term development of capitalism, 
an interest not frequent among economists after the classics, 
sothat anybody who shared it automatically tended to be 
regarded as a Marxist. Technological changes go hand in hand 
with accumulation of capital and both are characteristic 
for the long term development of capitalism. The 
accumulation process plays a central and active role in it 
according to Marx. This vision of accumulation as the 
driving force was later shared by Schumpeter, Kalecki and 
Keynes. The ressemblance is incomplete because in Marx 
there was no clear distinction between investment and 
saving. The term accumulation tended to cover both, saving 
and investment seemingly merging^ into one act, so that 
the priority given later by Kalecki and Keynes to investment 
did not find great attention; nor did the role of the 
banking system in the finance of accululation find it either. 
Even though the view of accumulation of real capital 
as the driving force was shared by Marx and the authors quoted. 
The following discussion will refer primarily to the 
Chapter 23 on the law of capitalist accumulation in Volume I 
of Capital ( rferences are to the German edition ). 
I shall make no use of value theory. Market prices 
will be used rather than labour values; thus I shall speak