Maurice Dobb's theory of crisis: a comment

Abstract

Anwar Shaikh's article on Maurice Dobb's theory of crisis (Shaikh, 1978) is mostly devoted to a defence of Marx (as interpreted by Shaikh) against Dobb. The main aim of this note is to show that Shaikh's arguments are open to serious criticism; a secondary purpose is to indicate some interesting and original aspects of Dobb's theory which deserve more attention than Shaikh gives them. Marx certainly believed that a rising technical composition of capital, as he called it, would bring about, in the long run at least, a rising value composition of capital. Dobb makes the objection that this is not the inevitable result of technical progress per se, as Marx appeared to think; it depends on the rate of technical progress in the sector pro ducing means of production relative to the rate in the sector producing means of con sumption (Dobb, 1940, p. 112). So long as these two rates are equal (and Marx gives no reason why they should differ) the value of producer goods will fall as fast as the value of consumer goods. The implication is that there may be no tendency for the rate of profit to fall as capitalism develops, unless the rate of surplus value falls. Against this, Shaikh is concerned to show that the rate of profit does have a tendency to fall even if the rate of surplus value remains constant, because the organic composition of capital tends to rise. He presents three sorts of arguments for the existence of this tendency. (1) In his Appendix 2, Shaikh claims to discuss 'the overall effects of mechanisation on the organic composition of capital'. However, in this Appendix the real issue is side stepped by assuming technical progress of a kind which yields a rising technical com position of capital as well as a constant ratio of unit values in the two departments. This may be a faithful presentation of Marx but it evades Dobb's criticism, which is precisely that capitalist development is not in fact characterised by both of these tendencies. (2) At one point (p. 238) Shaikh seems to argue that capitalists invest in more capital-intensive techniques in order to increase their control of the production process. Certainly such control is important to the extraction of surplus labour : capitalists need to ensure that production runs smoothly and that a reasonably high intensity of labour is maintained. But one cannot assume that the displacement of workers by machinery will necessarily help to solve this problem. To take an example: the more capital intensive technique may suffer a greater proportionate loss of output for a given rate of absenteeism, as a result of a different organisation of the production process. (3) Later on in his article (pp. 245-246), Shaikh discusses the argument that there can be no permanent tendency for the rate of profit to fall while real wages remain unchanged,