Is “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation” Still Valid? An Analysis Based on Direct and Indirect Marxian Effects

Serdal Bahçe

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Marx asserts that capital accumulation has been sample accompanied by the accumulation of industrial reserve army and surplus population. Contemporarily, this expansion has been fed by two tendencies. First, the change in the technical composition of capital makes a part of waged employment redundant. Second, migration-induced-growth of labor force has enlarged the size of industrial reserve army. In this respect, labor force growth itself is a function of accumulation/growth rather than vice versa. We call the first tendency as “direct Marxian effect” while the second one is “indirect Marxian effect”. For a list of 60 countries, this study estimates the direct and indirect Marixan elasticity of industrial reserve army and its components to accumulation/growth. The results indicate that “the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation” holds for the majority of countries.

Keywords: Industrial reserve army; capital accumulation; labor force; migration; indirect Marxian effect; direct Marxian effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B14 J21 J6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/101266/1/MPRA_paper_101266.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:101266

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().