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Toward a Marxian Model of Economic Growth

2016; American Economic Association; Volume: 67; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

1944-7981

David Laibman,

Economic Growth and Productivity

In 1942, Joan Robinson urged us to the frontiers of our economic understanding by comparing Marxian and orthodox economics in these terms: if there is any hope of progress in economics at all, it must be in using academic methods to solve the problems posed by (p. 95). In the spirit of that injunction, the present essay pursues the comparison on the limited terrain of models of economic growth. Its major finding is that an adequate conception of technical change as it occurs within capitalist production relations makes it possible to advance on both the Marxian and the growthmodel fronts. With regard to the former, it is the key to overcoming seemingly insurmountable indeterminacies in the dynamics of the crucial variables; with regard to the latter, it brings into focus a capitalist-investor who is neither the neoclassical plaything of the sovereign consumer, nor the all-powerful deus ex machina of the post-Keynesians. The model suggested here will also transcend the limitations of the steady state, without losing coherence, although like the main prototypes of the neoclassical and post-Keynesian models it will skirt the complexities arising from a rigorous treatment of heterogeneous outputs and fixed capital. The Marxian ambiguities stem from Marx's unsubstantiated of rising tendency of the composition of the ratio of the value of the stock of physical capital to the flow of current labor cooperating with that stock in production. For this ratio to rise, the accumulation of physical capital per unit of labor must exceed the at which rising productivity cheapens the elements of physical capital; in one-commodity macro terms, the physical capital-labor ratio, k, must grow more rapidly than the net productivity of labor, y. Marx never supplied a rationale for this assertion, although he repeatedly affirms that the rising organic composition of capital is another expression for the rising productivity of labor. (On this see Maurice Dobb, Paul Sweezy and Laibman 1976.) The rate of exploitation, or ratio of the unpaid to the paid portions of the working day, is a second crucial variable which, despite much discussion, does not have clear determinants, although Marx's conception of the relative impoverishment of the working class implies that this variable should have a rising tendency. The well-known upshot is that the famous law of the falling tendency of the of profit is deprived of a consistent foundation. Nevertheless, the Marxian vision has unique synthetic power: choice of technique is inseparable from technical change, and both are aspects of the investment process, which in turn is a moment of the wider concept of accumulation, entailing not only quantitative growth but also the extended reproduction of antagonistic social relations in production, i.e., the accumulation of capital in the full Marxian sense of that term. By contrast, the growth models of academic economics miss this vision, by either merging or rigidly separating its several aspects. In neoclassical growth, to illustrate, technical change *Assistant Professor, Brooklyn College, City University of New York. I wish to acknowledge the mathematical assistance of Ercument Ozizmir of Richmond College, and the computational assistance of Carl Lum of the Brooklyn College Computer Center. This paper is a report of a larger study in progress.