05.07.2012
Value, profit and crisis
Nick Rogers reviews Andrew Kliman The failure of capitalist production Pluto Press, London, 2012, pp256, £17.99
Andrew Kliman’s The failure of capitalist production is an important and in many ways iconoclastic contribution to the fast-growing body of literature produced by Marxist economists on the current economic crisis.
Kliman is a New York-based academic. Politically he is a Marxist-humanist in the tradition of Raya Dunayevskaya. Five years ago he introduced the approach of the “temporal single-system interpretation” (TSSI) of Marxist political economy to many socialist and communists activists who had never encountered it before, when his Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital’1 received wide attention.
Originating in a few scattered papers in the 1980s, the TSSI cohered in the 1990s. Alan Freeman is an academic who has been closely involved in developing its approach, including editing two influential collections of papers with others. The ideas of Guglielmo Carchedi are close to those of the TSSI. More recently Nick Potts has advocated the TSSI for the British journals, Critique and Capital and Class (over the years Capital and Class has published many of the debates between the TSSI school and their critics). Chris Harman embraced the TSSI in his last major book2 and generally the Socialist Workers Party has given the approach a positive response.
Kliman’s Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital’ focused on the academic controversies around Marx’s key theoretical concepts of the transformation of commodity values into prices of production and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in the face of labour-saving technological change. It argued that a century of Marxist economic scholarship had been led into an entirely unproductive dead end by its belief that the third volume of Capital contained logical inconsistencies requiring elaborate correction.
The result, according to Kliman, was either a lobotomised version of Marx’s political economy that rejected the labour theory of value (Ian Steedman3 and the other neo-Ricardians) or a variety of failed efforts to rescue the dynamics of Marx’s description of capitalism’s laws of motion and its essential instability (most other Marxist economists of the last three decades and more).
The TSSI school, by contrast, holds that a reading exists of Marx’s political economy that allows his economic analysis to make perfect sense, removing the alleged inconsistencies. It explicitly says that this does not prove that Marx was correct. But, regardless of whether or not Marx successfully constructs a model that approximates to reality, intellectual honesty demands that an interpretation of his work that accords him a modicum of intellectual rigour should be the starting point for both critics of Marx and those who claim to follow in his footsteps.
Great recession
The failure of capitalist production is Andrew Kliman’s application of the temporal single-system interpretation to the arc of capitalist development from the great depression of the 1930s to the current crisis that he calls the “great recession”. As Kliman says, the book is primarily an analysis of the empirical facts and he does not claim in this work to make new theoretical breakthroughs.
Of course, this is not to say that Kliman does not openly adhere to a theoretical perspective. He made clear in Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital’ his belief that Marx’s law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit (as a result of the increasing ratio of constant capital to workers employed in production - the organic composition of capital) is the most useful tool for understanding capitalist crisis. Kliman does not interpret Marx as arguing that profits fall in the long term - they fall and rise cyclically as part of the economic cycle and may even show a long-term rise if the cycle shortens.
In The failure of capitalist development, Kliman interprets his results to support the proposition that Marx’s law explains the underperformance of the economy since the 1970s. He quotes extensively from Marx and other theorists (including his rivals) and he spends a chapter debunking the underconsumptionism of Paul Sweezy and the Monthly Review school (chapter 8). He concludes (in chapter 9) by arguing that underconsumptionist perspectives inherently tend to offer reformist solutions to capitalism’s problems, while locating the source of those problems in the heart of production, as he does, has revolutionary implications for the politics of the working class.
The failure of capitalist production is therefore as much a contribution to theoretical discussion as a statistical handbook.
In brief, Kliman’s thesis is that the root cause of the crisis that began in 2007-08 was insufficient profitability. In fact the United States economy never fully recovered (in some ways never recovered at all) from the crisis years of 1973-82.
The post-war boom had been built on the enormous devaluation of capital in the decade of the great depression and then World War II. This devaluation of capital had facilitated a dramatic restoration of the rate of profit, which in turn provided the wherewithal for increased investment by capitalists. Growth rates soared.
Eventually, the ratio of capital assets to workers employed in production rose. In line with Marx’s labour theory of value, which holds that only productive human work adds value to commodities, the reduction of the proportion of workers to existing capital values in US industry brought down profit rates, leading to the economic crisis of the 1970s.
The 1970s differed from the 1930s in one big respect. This time around, governments were primed to step in to prevent business bankruptcies equivalent to those of 1929-33 - Kliman argues that the US government wanted to forestall a return to the radical working class activism of the US of the 1930s.
A devaluation of capital that would have allowed for a restoration of profit rates (by reducing the ratio of existing capital values to workers employed) was therefore blocked. Consequently the rate of profit continued to decline (or at least stagnate) through the 1980s and 1990s, and neither capitalist investment nor economic growth has been able to return to the levels of the decades after World War II.
Kliman juxtaposes this thesis to the alternative perspective, propounded by theorists who have written on the current crisis, such as John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, David Harvey, Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, and David McNally. They argue that neoliberal attacks on working class wages and conditions raised the level of exploitation from the 1980s onwards and allowed profit rates to be restored.
Most of them agree with Kliman that growth has been slower through most of the post-1970s period than previously. They attribute this phenomenon to problems of consumer demand (the classic underconsumptionist thesis). High profits that could not find sufficient investment opportunities in productive sectors (because expansion of these was constrained by the lack of markets for their output) instead poured into a variety of speculative ventures.
Kliman explains that, much to his own surprise, his crunching of the statistics revealed that the relative share of wages and profits in US national income has barely changed in the last three decades - if anything wages grab a slightly larger slice of the pie. Wages have risen more slowly in the last three decades than in the period after the war, but that is a consequence of the slowdown in overall economic growth.
Furthermore, many of the trends usually associated with neoliberalism - lower economic growth, financial instability, rising debt burdens, higher unemployment, rising inequality, deteriorating public infrastructure - began not when Reagan took office in 1981 and radically changed government economic and social policy, but in the first half of the 1970s or earlier. The cause of these trends needs to be located in a shift in underlying economic conditions rather than neoliberalism.
For Kliman, low profit rates were not the immediate cause of the 2007-08 crash - indeed he measures profit rates as rising in the years leading up to 2007. The bursting of the housing market bubble in the US (not just the so-called sub-prime housing market) in Kliman’s narrative - as in that of the ‘underconsumptionists’ - is responsible for the timing of the crisis.
However, low profit rates led to the succession of debt crises and asset and financial bubbles in the years since the early 1980s, as capital sought to escape from poor rates of return in the productive economy by turning to unsustainable speculation - 2007-08 was simply the latest bubble that had inevitably to burst.
Rate of profit
Marx defines the economy-wide rate of profit as the aggregate returns to the capitalist class (profit, interest and rent) as a proportion of the aggregate capital advanced by the capitalist class at the start of the production cycle. Note that this definition includes not just the capital consumed during the production cycle (ie, in Marxist terminology the circulating constant and variable capital and the normal wear and tear of the fixed capital), but the whole of the fixed capital involved in the production process (ie, the value of all the buildings, machinery, etc that last for more than one production cycle).
Now, why does the level of the rate of profit across the whole capitalist economy matter? This is a question that Hillel Ticktin raised last year in the Weekly Worker.4 It is clear why differences in the rate of profit between companies, industries, sectors and national economies are crucial. Since profit and the self-expansion of capital are the motivating factor at the heart of capitalist economics, capitalists have no alternative but to chase the highest possible profit on pain of being put out of business by their competitors.
In this sense, individual capitalists are simply the agents of blind economic forces - morality does not enter the equation. A failure to maximise profit equates to ejection from the capitalist class.
Indeed, it is the constant movement of capital in search of the highest available profits that is the basis of Marx’s discussion of the formation of an average rate of profit and the transformation of commodity values into prices of production in volume 3 of Capital (the volume in which the concept of the rate of profit is first introduced).
But this does not explain why the level of the average rate of profit is important. Whether the economy-wide rate of profit is high or low, capitalists have no option but to continue pursuing profit-maximising activities. Why should their behaviour change with fluctuations in the rate of profit that affects everyone, such as the post-1960s fall that Andrew Kliman identifies?
Kliman offers two explanations. First, since surplus value (the new value created by workers in the production process minus the wages paid to the workers) is the only source of the income (profit, interest and rent) available to capitalists for reinvesting, the rate at which capitalists invest in the economy cannot exceed the rate of profit. This rate of accumulation subsequently determines growth rates in the economy, so a falling rate of profit inevitably means slower growth.
The underconsumptionists with whom Kliman is doing intellectual battle agree that the rate of profit serves as a ceiling to the rate of accumulation. They also generally concur with Kliman’s view that the rate of accumulation has stagnated since the 1970s.
The essence of their argument, however, is that the rate of accumulation can fall below the rate of profit (since it is not a floor) and that in the era of neoliberalism high profits have been diverted to financial speculation and a variety of asset bubbles rather than being productively invested. Since only the productive sectors of the economy create value - as opposed to sectors such as finance that simply share in the surplus value created elsewhere - economic growth has slowed.
This narrative rests on what seems to me the frankly implausible hypothesis that, despite reaping higher profits than ever in the productive sectors of the economy, capitalist investors have been alerted by 20-20 foresight to the risk that any additional increase in production in these sectors would run smack-bang into a brick wall of insufficient consumer spending power. In the neoliberal economy, apparently, the rate of profit no longer determines the direction of the flows of capital.
The fact that Kliman’s measure of the rate of profit since 1970 matches very closely his measure of the rate of accumulation over the same period (see fig 5.8 on p91), requiring no faith whatsoever in the soothsaying abilities of today’s capitalist class, to me suggests we should pay close attention to his explanation of slowing growth rates.
Kliman references the work of Emmanuel Farjoun and Moshé Machover (Moshé is a theorist and activist familiar to readers of the Weekly Worker) in expanding on the second reason why the economy-wide rate of profit is a determinant factor in a capitalist economy. In Laws of chaos5 Farjoun and Machover sought to reclaim the labour theory of value from the theoretical black hole into which Ian Steedman and the other followers of Sraffa had cast it.
Applying techniques learnt in physics (such as the statistical mechanics of Maxwell and Boltzmann) to Marx’s political economy, Farjoun and Machover do not reach the same conclusions as the TSSI school - for instance, they reject Marx’s equalisation of the rate of profit model. However, Kliman eagerly adopts their demolition of the concept of a uniform rate of profit as being mathematically unsound and lacking any basis in reality. If rates of profit vary between companies, industries and sectors having a more or less wide distribution around an average rate of profit, a fall in that average is going to place those capitalists earning below the average in increasing peril, as their individual profit rates plunge towards zero (see discussion on pages 17-19 and fig 2.1).
If profit rates remain low their difficulties will persist. They will take on increasing debt. They might turn towards speculative activity in a last-ditch effort to turn a dollar. Precisely the behaviour of capital in the era of neoliberal capitalism.
TSSI
The central chapters of The failure of capitalist production (chapters 5, 6 and 7) involve a lot of closely argued statistical analysis (supported by a lot of graphs and tables).
Andrew Kliman is the first to acknowledge several of the limitations he faces in poring through the data provided by the US department of commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Yet he is not the only Marxist economist wrestling valiantly with the statistics made available by the BEA. Most attempts to measure trends in the rate of profit turn to exactly the same data set. They are restricted therefore to the US.6 They measure returns on fixed assets rather than total capital advanced.
Why, in contrast to Kliman’s evidence that profit rates flat-lined or fell, do so many other Marxist economists find that the rate of profit in the US recovered after the early 1980s? The difference between them revolves around the key aspects of the temporal single-system interpretation.
The TSSI says, first, that the constant and variable capital inputs into the production process should be measured at the prices that were paid for them, rather than trying to either calculate the values or prices of production (the prices at which the capitalists producing the commodities would earn the average rate of profit) of these inputs. Bortkiewicz’s ‘correction’ (popularised by Paul Sweezy7) to Marx’s transformation of values into prices of production or any other correction to Marx’s procedure in volume 3 of Capital is unnecessary and Marx’s aggregate equalities (values and prices, surplus value and profit, the value and the price rates of profit) are not broken.
Nor are Marxist economists left with the painstaking and virtually impossible task of working out the values behind market prices (by iteration or regression or whatever). The TSSI therefore holds to a single-system (rather than a dual-system) interpretation of values and prices.
Second, the TSSI says that calculations of the rate of profit should take account of changes in value over time - hence the ‘temporal’ in TSSI. So the historic prices that capitalists paid for inputs should form the baseline of the calculation. In this way the effect of changes in those values are captured. After all, changes in value are the basis of Marx’s prediction that rates of profit will tend to fall. Technological innovation that raises the productivity of workers reduces the amount of labour that is involved in producing individual commodities - the value of a commodity may not be the same at the end of a production period as at the beginning.
This is the riposte of the TSSI school to proofs, such as the influential Okishio’s theorem, that labour-saving technological change cannot lower the rate of profit.
Unfortunately for the cause of consensus among Marxist economists, most reject the TSSI approach. They resolutely measure inputs to the production process - in effect fixed capital assets - at current replacement cost. There are a lot of technical arguments about taking account of inflation - the TSSI uses a concept known as the ‘monetary expression of labour-time’ (Melt) to discount for inflation and depreciation of capital values. These technical arguments end up measuring starkly different trends in the rate of profit for the decades since 1982.
One factor that ‘historic cost’ measures of the rate of profit capture that ‘current replacement cost’ measures miss is the losses suffered by capitalists due to what Marx called moral depreciation. This is the premature obsolescence of fixed capital (over and above normal wear and tear) due to innovations that supersede previous technologies or cheapen existing technologies.
Moral depreciation is obviously enormously important to the dynamic of capitalism and may be either positively or inversely related to changes in the organic composition of capital - for instance, it may reflect a lowering of the organic composition if the relative value of constant capital in the production process falls. It is an aspect of the “revolutions in value” that Marx intimated could destabilise the reproduction schema he set out in volume 2 of Capital.
For me, the TSSI approach cuts through a lot of the confusion that has enveloped the field of Marxist political economy. On the question of historic versus current replacement costs, it seems to me that the application of a temporal perspective to the returns on the prices that have actually been paid for inputs offers at least the prospect of measuring the real rates of profit of real capitalists.
Long waves
Beyond the TSSI debate, there is a key aspect of Andrew Kliman’s theorisation of the development of US capitalism in the second half of the 20th century - the role of the devaluation of capital in the economic cycle - which seems to me not to work.
The first problem is that nowhere in The failure of capitalist production does Kliman explicitly engage with the debate in Marxist political economy about the length of the economic cycles. In the three volumes of Capital and Theories of surplus value Marx analyses the economic cycles of bust and boom, lasting between seven and 10 years, which he believed began with the emergence of fully-developed industrial capitalism after the Napoleonic wars - a comprehensive explanation of capitalism’s cyclical crises was to be the crowning achievement of the Capital that Marx originally envisaged, but sadly never competed.
In a footnote in volume 3, written with the stagnationary phase of capitalist development of the mid-1870s to the early 1890s in mind, Engels suggested that, with the increasing concentration and centralisation of capital and competition between states, the cyclical crises of capitalism might be lengthening.
In the 1920s Kondratiev and Trotsky sharply debated the causes of what both saw as long-term economic cycles of alternating rapid and much slower growth that extended over periods of half a century, give or take a decade or two. Trotsky insisted that politics and the class struggle were integral to the switch from one phase of the cycle to another and rejected the economic determinism of Kondratiev.
Ernest Mandel introduced long-wave theory to a modern Marxist audience just as the long post-war boom came to an end.8 These extended cycles were conceptualised by neither Kondratiev, Trotsky nor Mandel as replacing (as Engels had suggested) Marx’s decade-long economic cycle. Shorter economic cycles continued, but were either dampened down or accentuated, depending on the phase of long wave.
In the absence of clarification, we have to assume that Kliman’s primary focus is on long waves. The failure of capitalist production is concerned with explaining, first, the post-war boom, which lasted the best part of three decades and, second, the four decades that have elapsed since that boom came to an end. That looks like a long wave to me.
But does Kliman think that there are short-term fluctuations within the expansionary or stagnationary phases of the long wave that require theoretical explanation? He mentions none within the long post-war boom. Perhaps Kliman tends towards Engels’s version of long-wave theory rather than Trotsky’s or Mandel’s?
When it comes to the last 30 years, Kliman does refer to the succession of speculative bubbles the world has experienced. And he talks about the economic peaks and troughs (of growth and profit rates) over this period, the bubbles being driven by the falling profit rates that are the principal focus of his book.
However, are the expansion and bursting of these bubbles (and the peaks and troughs associated with them) indicative of cycles within the long wave? Or are they simply relatively random phenomena indicative of longer-term trends? In either case, why was capitalism able to recover relatively speedily from the abrupt ending of previous bubbles, while we are still living with the consequences of the bubble that burst in 2007-08?
Devaluation
Kliman’s central thesis is that government intervention from the crisis of the 1970s onwards has prevented the kind of devaluation of capital that accompanied the great depression, and allowed profit rates to be restored to the level of the 1940s, 50s and most of the 60s. The devaluation of capital certainly features prominently in Marx’s writings as a potential source of recovery - nowhere more so than in the context of his discussion of the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit in volume 3 of Capital.
In an economic crisis a multitude of economic enterprises go out of business. Demand for the elements of fixed capital and circulating capital collapses. Disaster strikes worker and capitalist alike. However, for those capitalists with the resources, skill or luck to survive the crash, raw materials, machinery, perhaps whole factories can be snapped up for next to nothing. The effect is to rapidly raise the potential rate of profit.
The amount of capital that must be advanced by the survivors in order to produce commodities is sharply cut. If those commodities can be sold at a price that represents the pre- or post-slump value of the capital that is involved in their production (rather than the devalued price for which they have been purchased), the profit that will be made (as a result of the new value created in the production process) will represent a higher ratio to the advanced capital. Hey presto! The rate of profit will sharply rise.
There are a number of provisos. If the price of all commodities falls by the same proportion, no relative values have changed (as the Melt of the TSSI will confirm). So the devaluation of capital only works as a restorative of the rate of profit if the price of the inputs into the production process falls faster than the outputs.
When Kliman cites the statistics (on p22) that between 1929 and 1933 the prices of goods and services fell by 25%, while between 1928 and the end of 1932 the prices of fixed assets owned by US corporations fell by 23% - ie, slightly less - all he proves is a generalised deflation.
On the other hand, if the inputs are purchased prior to an economic upturn that subsequently raises the prices of commodities relative to the price at which they were purchased - ie, they change across the period of a single circulation of capital - profit rates will rise. The circulation of fixed capital obviously takes place over an extended period, so in the case of that component of the production process there is greater scope for relative values to change.
To this end, Kliman provides a striking statistic (on p77): between the start of 1931 and the start of 1945, the advanced capital of US corporations increased by 3%, yet there was a 164% increase in GDP during the same period. So, while output increased more than two and a half times, the price US capitalists paid for the fixed assets (presumably physically much expanded) that produced that increased output in effect did not rise at all. How could they fail to reap much higher rates of profit?
But this is where the question of the length of the economic cycle we are considering is crucial. Marx explores the idea that economic cycles of a decade or less might be linked to the average lifetime of fixed capital. In this context, the devaluation of fixed capital assets during the slump phase of the cycle can conceivably provide the impetus to sustain a boom phase of no more than, say, seven or eight years.
It is much more difficult to see the devaluation of capital assets in the 1930s sustaining historically high profit rates and economic growth all the way through to the mid-1960s - long after the average lifetime of most of those assets had expired. Especially since Kliman’s argument that the destruction wrought by World War II had a similar effect in value terms to that of the great depression is unsustainable. There is a radical difference between the complete physical destruction of capital assets (the destruction of their use value) and the loss of value (the destruction of their exchange value). A bombed factory (not that the US suffered these kinds of direct losses on the mainland) or, for that matter, a factory that has been decommissioned for so long that its equipment is rusted beyond repair, is in no position to provide much, if any, input into a new production cycle.
In fact, far from deflating capital values, the effects of war are inflationary. World war increases the demand for the inputs into production (and destroys such large quantities of what is produced) to such an extent that shortages become acute, and rationing and extensive government direction of the economy become essential.
So it is even less likely that the destruction of capital values that did take place in the 1930s could still be directly raising profit rates two or three decades later. In fact one of Kliman’s graphs (fig 7.7 on p135) shows the rate of profit on new fixed capital investments averaging 10% from 1947 to 2007 and over those 60 years staying below the rate of profit on all fixed capital investments (which declines from 22% to just over 10%). The implication is that fixed capital in place by 1947 had a substantial effect on overall profit rates for six decades.
Yet how many of the factories, production plants and machine tools purchased by 1947 were still playing a significant role even 20 years later? Kliman explains (on p77) that in the 14 years after 1945, corporations’ advanced capital increased by 192%: ie, the value of fixed capital investments in the US economy almost tripled, and that is after allowing for the depreciation of earlier investments. Those original fixed assets which had miraculously survived must have composed a tiny proportion of total fixed assets.
Capital devaluation may well have contributed to kick-starting the boom, but how could it have sustained it?
Now, I agree absolutely with Kliman that, while crises erupt in the sphere of circulation with the generalised breaking of the linkages between sellers and buyers, a proper application of Marx’s political economy should look for the causes of capitalist crisis in the sphere of production - in the creation of value rather than its realisation.
Nothing in Marx’s political economy supports an underconsumptionist explanation of crisis. Marx does not privilege demand for the commodities of department two (consumer goods) over those of department one (investment goods). As Kliman says, it is a false “underconsumptionist intuition” to suppose that capitalist production in some sense aims to meet human need - to quote Marx, capitalism is “accumulation for the sake of accumulation”.
The destruction of value in a slump is a phenomenon of the circulation of capital rather than of the production of capital. The physical relationships of different categories of capital in production are not changed by the loss of exchange value. Therefore no change to the organic composition of capital occurs, since the organic composition is the same as “the value composition of capital, in so far as it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors the changes in the latter”.9
If the ultimate cause of crises is to be found in the sphere of production, should we not also look to the same sphere as the most likely source of the kind of changes that can decisively overcome a crisis, especially when we are talking about an upturn on the scale of the post-war boom?
It is noticeable that Kliman - other than rejecting a rising rate of surplus value from the 1980s onwards - does not explore the possibility that a combination of the countervailing factors to the falling rate of profit sketched out by Marx in volume 3 of Capital could contribute to an explanation of the strength of the post-war boom and the weakness or otherwise of the post-1970s economy.
Just such a perspective is a strength of Ernest Mandel’s thesis in Late capitalism when he discusses 19th and early 20th century long waves - reductions in the value of fixed or circulating constant capital, revolutions in transport technology that transformed turnover time, the incorporation into the world market of new areas of the globe with a lower organic composition.10 It is a weakness of his thesis that, like Kliman, Mandel resorts to a mono-causal explanation of the post-war boom - a rising rate of surplus value.
If Kliman’s reliance on the devaluation of capital fails to explain in full the post-war boom, neither is an aborted devaluation of capital in the 1970s (and over the last five years) likely to tell the whole story of the last several decades or the most recent crisis. In my view, a theorisation of the dynamics of post-war capitalist development needs to mine all the reserves of Marx’s rich project of political economy.
Nor does Kliman seek to explain what neoliberalism represents or what the US and other governments intended the new ruling class strategy to achieve. If attacks on workers’ rights, shrinking trade union membership and consistently higher unemployment cannot raise the rate of surplus value (which is Kliman’s finding), an inverse version of the 19th century ‘iron law of wages’, against which Marx polemicised, seems to have been in operation in the latter part of the 20th century.
So The failure of capitalist production is a valuable source of ideas, argument and data. It should be read by anyone interested in where capitalism is going and in debates within Marxist political economy. However, the last word on the contours of contemporary capitalism and its crises is yet to be written.
nick.rogers@weeklyworker.org.uk
Notes
1 . A Kliman Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital’: a refutation of the myth of inconsistency Lanham MD, 2007.
2 . Albeit in the endnotes to the discussion on p49, C Harman Zombie capitalism: global crisis and the relevance of Marx London 2009.
3 . I Steedman Marx after Sraffa London 1977.
4 . H Ticktin, ‘The theory of capitalist disintegration’ Weekly Worker September 8 2011.
5 . E Farjoun and M Machover Laws of chaos: a probabilistic approach to political economy London 1983.
6 . See M Macnair, ‘Clear economics, weak politics’ Weekly Worker February 22 2012, a review of Paul Mattick’s 2011 book, Business as usual (that reaches similar conclusions to Kliman), for a discussion of the risks involved in capturing trends in the US in isolation from those in the rest of the world.
7 . P Sweezy The theory of capitalist development New York 1970 (1942), chapter 7.
8 . E Mandel Late capitalism London 1975 (1972).
9 . K Marx Capital Vol 1, London 1976, p762.
10. E Mandel Late capitalism London 1975 (1972), pp130-32.