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
q
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
02
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 a§jumuiat ion 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 accumulatinn 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