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While the crisis is getting worse, the Marxist economists discuss about statistics ...
In order to avoid the savagery, the world proletariat uprising is necessary. Which necessarily implies the program elaboration and the Communist Party building, leaving to the bourgeois economists the debate about the reliability of this or that statistic datum.
The thesis according to which the current crisis origin lies in the abnormal growth of the financial sphere and in the speculative excesses of the banking system, after the failure of all the monetary policy measures taken to face it, has remained almost completely supportless. Conversely, for some time, more and more economists, in the attempt to understand its causes, refer to Marx and his critique on the political economy but with so divergent results that sometimes it is even hard to get the common reference to the author of “Capital”. In fact some people attribute the crisis to the famous but also controversial law of the average interest rate fall described by Marx in the 13th, 14th and 15th chapters of the third volume of “Capital”, with the related references to the 6th-10th chapters of the first volume; others, on the contrary, maintain it is an overproduction crisis determined by the new-liberal policies taken all around the world since the early 1980s that, facilitating the generalized wage cut and the wealth concentration in the hands of few people, would have caused a considerable contraction of aggregate demand, too.
Somehow, this thesis echoes the one maintained by Rosa Luxemburg at the beginning of the last century, according to which, very briefly, in the structure of a mere capitalistic system, the creation of an additional demand, able to absorb the growing goods production coming from the use in their production of a more and more growing capital assets, is impossible. As a result, Rosa Luxemburg concluded, the enlarged capital reproduction could take place successfully only in the presence, next to the capitalistic areas, of non-capitalistic ones. All this originated the phenomenon of Imperialism coming from the necessity for the more advanced capitalistic countries to ensure themselves the control over these areas and, in so far as this implied their inclusion in the capitalistic ones, the unavoidability of the crisis of the capitalistic mode of production and of the necessity “of the international working class uprising”.
The current supporters of the overproduction crisis, on the other hand, come to totally different conclusions, that is by means of the Keynesian economic policies supplying the aggregate demand, crises can be not only overcome but even avoided. [1]
It is to be said that, unfortunately, even those who refer to the law of the average profit rate fall, save few rare exceptions, tend to elude the fact that, once assumed the law of the tendency in the rate of profit to fall as the crisis ultimate cause, also its unavoidability as well as the temporary nature of the capitalistic mode of production and so of the necessity for the Communist revolution, above all in a capitalistic society as mature as the present one.
This is a very clamorous absence which, furthermore, rather than facilitating the debate expansion and the in-depth analysis of the crisis reasons and of its perspectives, relegates it in inner circles, mainly of the academic world, reducing it to a scholastic discussion on the statistic data determination methods that both the ones and the others bring about to support their respective theses.
As concerns us, as it is known, we have always maintained that an exhaustive analysis of the crisis causes cannot in any way prescind from the law of the tendency in the rate of profit to fall and that the overproduction phenomenon, if the law is accurately interpreted, does not contradict it, but it is fully included in it.
The law in brief [2]
First of all we have to recall that Marx, with the law of the tendency in the rate of profit to decrease, does not discover the phenomenon, but, bringing it back to the contradictions typical of the capital accumulation process, shows that it cannot be attributed to nature – as the classical economic thought and in particular Ricardo affirmed in the income theory – but to the limits typical of the capitalistic mode of production. Thus it is that also the Marginalist School, later, has had to come to terms with this phenomenon. In fact, given the law of offer and demand and the trend to reach the balance point (the point at which offer and demand level off) springing from it, a progressive price and consequently profit cut is unavoidable until its cancellation when, the balance point reached, the price levels on the marginal cost (cost of the last produced unit).
According to Marx, obviously, the phenomenon has a different origin and can be understood only if it is brought back to the law of value-labour and to the fact that the goods production is not the capitalist’s aim in itself but the mean making possible, through the exploitation of the labour force, the increase, just as the general capital formula M-C-M’ says, of his capital (capital accumulation or expanded reproduction).
Let’s see briefly how it works. In order to produce a certain commodity, certain means of production and a certain amount of labour force, that is a certain number of workers, are needed. So, the capitalist has necessarily to invest a share of his monetary capital M to buy the means of production and another share to buy the labour force that is the wages to pay the workers. Marx calls constant capital (c) the one invested in means of production and variable capital (v) the one invested in labour force, while he calls organic composition of capital [3] the ratio between these two components, both from the technical point of view and from the one concerning their value.
He defines constant the capital invested in the means of production because these last, having already incorporated the surplus extorted from the labour force used in their production, can transfer to the new commodity only their value. That is: the investment in constant capital does not create new surplus and therefore neither the profit coming from it.
For the opposite reason, being the only source of surplus, Marx, on the other hand, defines variable the capital invested in labour force.
Given, for instance, a wage X for a working day of eight hours and supposed that it takes the workers four hours to produce the amount of goods equal to their wage value (necessary labour time), since the capitalist with that certain wage ensures himself the right to appropriate all the goods produced in the entire working day, as a result he appropriates the four working hours exceeding the necessary labour time without paying them. Marx calls surplus labour or, if considered from the side of value, surplus value, the working day segment exceeding the necessary labour time, while he defines rate of surplus value the ratio between surplus value and variable capital (SV/v) and rate of profit the ratio between surplus value and total capital (SV/C where C=c + v).
Even though very briefly, this is the law of value-labour that Marx has placed as a foundation of the law of the tendency in the rate of profit to fall.
So, by means of the production of goods, the capital invested in it, by incorporating the surplus value extorted from the labour force, increases so much that the original capital M, when goods are sold, will result equal to M’=M+SV. [4]
In other words, thanks to the exploitation of labour force, in each new production cycle, the original capital M will be greater than the one of the previous cycle. This implies that, so that the expanded reproduction can take place at least with the same speed and intensity of the previous cycle, after each cycle also the amount of surplus value extorted from the labour force increases.
In order to achieve this aim, the capitalist will therefore have to increase both the means of production, that is the constant capital, and the labour force, so that, without prejudice to the ratio between the two components, an additional surplus value can be realised, also the new capital can be remunerated and can increase at least as much as the one invested in the previous production cycle.
Let’s suppose, now, that the capitalist, pushed by the necessity to increase the production of surplus value, introduces more machineries than labour force and that, for whatever reason, the rate of surplus value keeps unchanged, since the rate of profit is given by the ratio SV/C, we can observe that, to the constant capital increase, will inescapably correspond a decrease in the rate of profit. In other words, to a constant capital increase in a quite greater measure than the variable one, will necessarily correspond a decrease in the rate of profit. This, bear in mind, does not exclude that by increasing the total production, the mass of profit can increase.
The counteracting influences
Now, since the expanded reproduction of capital may take place only if an increase of surplus value corresponds to an increase in constant capital, too, the capitalist, in as much as the constant capital increases quite more than the variable one, will necessarily have to find the way to increase the production of surplus value, that is the intensity of exploitation of labour. The procedures to achieve this goal are substantially two: a) through the introduction in the production processes of technologically more and more advanced machineries, which also implies a further increase in constant capital; b) through the prolongation of the working day.
With the first, thanks to the increase of the labour productivity, being a worker able to produce in the same unit of time a greater amount of goods, leaving untouched the length of working day and the wage value, the necessary labour time reduces to the surplus labour advantage and then to the surplus value (relative surplus value). With the second, on the other hand, since the surplus labour increases, the surplus value (absolute surplus value) increases even if the necessary labour time keeps, caeteris paribus, unchanged. [5]
The one procedure does not exclude the other even if, from the capitalist’s standpoint, the prolongation of the working day, not implying a modification in the organic composition of capital, shows itself as the most advantageous. But this procedure clashes with some objective limits that, in the end, are human being’s physiological limits. The human being, as indeed any other animal, in order to work needs also to rest, eat, therefore: to perform all those functions without which his same survival and reproduction would not be possible. Furthermore, as it has been observed in several studies carried out over the last hundred years, beyond a certain point, the prolongation of the working day gets incompatible with the increase of the labour productivity.
In Great Britain, after the introduction of the steam engine, the working day was prolonged until it reached 16 hours per day. But at this point, beside the strong working class opposition, many sectors of the same bourgeoisie (nowadays we would say: the enlightened bourgeoisie) increased their awareness that such an extended working day undermined the foundations of the same social capitalistic formation and at the same time prevented the further increases in the labour productivity, made possible by the constant improvements in the machinery system. Then, the State, as bearer of the general conservation instances of the system, put a legal limit to the length of the working day, reducing it at first in 1844 to twelve hours and after in 1847 to ten hours.
Since then, the increase in work productivity has been the most effective proceeding to increase the surplus value production.
But since some time, thanks to the fact that through the new work organization based on robotics, many particularly hard tasks have been transferred to the machinery system, the tendency to prolong the working day has had a new impulse.
In addition to the increase of the degree of labour exploitation, other factors oppose to the fall of the rate of profit: the depression of wages below their value; the cheapening of elements of constant capital; the relative over-population; foreign trade; the increase of stock capital. [6] Marx calls them counteracting influences and examines them fully in the 14th chapter of the third Volume of Capital to which we refer for any further in-depth analysis.
Here we are interested in highlighting the conclusion to which Marx comes and that is: “ ... in a general way that the same influences which produce a tendency in the general rate of profit to fall, also call forth counter-effects, which hamper, retard, and partly paralyse this fall. [...] Thus, the law acts only as a tendency. And it is only under certain circumstances and only after long periods that its effects become strikingly pronounced.” [7]
In other words, the law fully shows itself only when, given a certain average organic composition of total capital, despite the counteracting influences, the ratio between the surplus value extorted on the whole to the labour force and the capital advanced in goods production, results more and more decreasing.
Now, since, as we have seen, the monetary capital M is transformed into industrial capital C only in view of its increase in M’, it is evident that, because of the default of the expectation to remunerate also the new capital at least at the previous rate of profit, the process of capital reproduction slows down until giving life to those crises cyclically shaking the capitalistic mode of production to its very foundation.
So, in relation to the different speed at which the process of capital reproduction takes place, within the ambit of an entire accumulation cycle of the overall capital, we can distinguish an ascending phase, where the counteracting influences annul the tendency in the rate of profit to decrease, and a descending one, when, in spite of their opposition, the decrease is slackened, but not annulled. In both phases, anyhow, abrupt accelerations and likewise abrupt slowdowns, due to merely present-day causes, are always possible.
A methodological question
All this, above all in the descending phase and when it prolongs for a long time, as it is happening in the current crisis, has always offered the opponents of the Law the starting point, on the basis of the data referring to the increase of the profit total mass recorded in these moments, in order to support its groundlessness, even if it is evident a general opposite tendency and that the increase of the profit mass not necessarily implies at once the increase of the rate of profit, too. Then, it is amazing that even those who refer to the Law, get so often entrapped in debates about the reliability or unreliability of the utilized data or on the method used to determine them.
Moreover, in order to determine the trend of the rate of general profit in relation to the modifications of the organic composition of capital, as Marx defines it, is a very complex, not to say impossible, matter. The same determination of the organic composition of capital, being a matter of estimating in terms of value the ratio between the technical composition and the one of capital value on a world scale, implies the knowledge of a steep number of prices furthermore often different among them, even if referring to a same constitutive element of capital. Not to say about the difficulty to have sufficiently homogeneous data referring to different moments. Even more so, also the determination of the rate of profit will be difficult.
On the other hand, how would that infinite multitude of economists - who, in every moment of the day and of the night, crank out previsions about the economic cycle trend – get the famous four coins for the boiled meat, to say it with Carducci [8], if, thanks to the sequence of statistical data which they match them with, they didn’t pass them off as an outcome of an accurate scientific research? All the more so in the computer age when it is possible to create complex econometric models in less time than once it took to perform a problem solvable with the only four operations.
This is a curse of our times, which unfortunately does not spare even the Marxist economists, above all if they are academic ones, that is considering the phenomena and the laws referring to the unwinding of the economic process assimilated to the phenomena and the laws of Physics.
The economic process, since it springs from the dynamic twine of objective and subjective factors, excludes that the laws referring to it and the previews that can be formulated starting from them, can be proved, like the ones referring to Physics, by means of experiments in laboratory. A computer able to calculate the working class capacity to resist the increase of the labour force exploitation degree that the capital accumulation process determines, has not been invented yet, and we have grounded reasons to believe that it will never be invented.
Therefore, to verify the ground of the law of the tendency in the general rate of profit to fall, there is no other way than comparing the correspondence of the formulated previews, starting from it, with the issues of the economic process during its historical development. Which, in the present case, involves also the correspondence of the examined phenomenon with the underlying law of the value-labour. On the contrary, the proof of its possible groundlessness implies also the one of the groundlessness of the law of value-labour and of the corollary deriving from it: that the production of surplus-value can only come from the exploitation of the labour force (living labour).
An example
Let’s examine a phenomenon common to the crisis preceding the World War I, the one of 1929 and the current one: the bulimic growth of the financial sphere.
According to the law of the fall of the rate of profit, the phenomenon takes place, since the aim of capitalists is increasing the invested capital, when the expectation that this aim could be achieved by means of the transformation of the original capital M into industrial capital, fails. Then, the capitalist agents, rather than immobilizing their additional capitals in the production of goods, prefer to maintain them liquid; not so much to hoard them as to be able to invest them in the same financial sphere as capitals producing interest or in speculation.
From the single capitalist standpoint, in fact, it is totally indifferent that his original capital M increases through the production of goods or by investing it as a capital producing interest or in speculative activities. But it is not so in respect to the total capital accumulation cycle.
According to the law of the value-labour, in the M-M’ cycle, there is no production of surplus-value from scratch, so what for the single capitalist is an enlarged reproduction of capital, in reality is only a transfer of capitals from one hand to another; in some cases, as for example in the State money production, previews of a possible future surplus-value production and/or parasitical surplus-value appropriation coming anyway from the so-called real economy. So in the course of time, the generation of an accelerated gap between the total production of real wealth and the nominal one of capitals occurring in the financial sphere is unavoidable. Therefore, when the gap gets over a certain threshold, unavoidably the financial markets will be shaken by more and more frequent and devastating crises, where, overnight, enormous masses of financial capital turn into thin air, so confirming the ephemeral, fictitious nature of monetary capital produced starting from other monetary capital and without the mediation of production of goods. In other words, the string of more and more frequent financial crises is at the same time a further confirmation of the law of the tendency in the rate of profit to fall and of the law of the value-labour.
According to a research of the consulting firm McKinsey “In 1980, the total value of the world financial activities was roughly equal to the world GNP; at the end of 2007, the world financial depth, that is the ratio of these activities in respect to the gross product, was of 356%”. So it is not a coincidence that while in the years from 1945 to 1971, on a world scale, there was no bank crisis, between 1975 and 2010 there were “not less than 160 financial crises and 54 bank crises”. [9]
But despite the financial market crises and until the entire system does not paralyze, for the single capitalist agents the fact remains that the financial investment is, if not more profitable, thanks to the fact that the liquidity is greater, at least more attractive than the industrial investment.
The result is that different rates of return between the financial sphere and the industrial one, in the strict sense of the term, are produced. For the capitals invested in the world of production and that cannot be disinvested, to put in place all the conditions facilitating the increase of surplus-value production by means of the exploitation of the same or of a reduced labour force, becomes a matter of life or death. And since, as we have already seen, the most effective way is increasing the degree of labour-force exploitation, in the world of production of goods we can observe, on one hand, a slowdown of the flux of supplementary capitals invested in it and, on the other hand, a boost to employ a reduced quantity of labour-force for the same or even greater quantity of goods. The result is the increase of unemployment, the increase of the reserve industrial army and the increase of competition among workers and, therefore, the unavoidable wage devaluation. And in doing so, also the boost to change the capital organic composition strengthens at the expense of the variable capital. In other words, the whole process, by which the causes determining the reduction of the rate of profit are the same ones activating the causes opposing to them, undergoes a very strong acceleration.
At this point, it seems important to us to stress that, starting from the law of the tendency in the rate of profit to fall, we do not only explain the specific phenomenon put in evidence by the crisis – in this case, the growth of the financial sphere – but we also get its dynamic intertwining with all the other phenomena highlighted by the crisis and that, together with the considered one, are ascribable, without any contradiction among them, to the same law.
Once the question is put in these terms, it emerges also how much the contrast between the crisis caused by the law of the fall of the rate of profit and the one caused by overproduction is overblown, forced, if not specious, since it is evident that the reduction of the rate of profit, determining a contraction of employment and the wage devaluation, determines also a contraction of the aggregate demand and so a relative overproduction of goods and/or an underutilisation of the plants, too, though a great amount of human needs remains unsatisfied.
The crisis and the unoccurred imperialistic war
But there is another aspect of the question, in many senses settling, which in our opinion, in the debates on the origin of the crises of the accumulation cycle, is not taken into due account. We are referring to the relation crisis/imperialistic war.
Given the law of the fall of the average rate of profit, just because it is immanent in the capitalistic mode of production, the crises periodically springing from it are unavoidable and, keeping unchanged the capitalistic relationships of production, insurmountable by one’s own will. That is, even if we trust in the invisible hand of the market or in the State intervention in support of the demand and/or supply, the accumulation process as a whole can start again only when a new organic composition of the total capital and a rate of profit thanks to which the direct investment in the production of goods becomes again sufficiently profitable, will be redetermined. In other words, a new capital accumulation cycle cannot begin without a significant generalized destruction of the exceeding accumulated capitals.
It was so for the crisis of the late 19th century, given rise to the World War I, and for the 1929 one, given rise to, although the New Deal and the adoption all over the world of Keynesian economic policies, the World War II. A datum seems to us very meaningful in order to highlight the decisive role played by the World War II: in the USA, at that time the greatest industrial power in the world and not certainly by chance the epicentre of the crisis, the industrial production reached the pre-crisis levels only in 1946, that is after the war ended.
Coming back to the present day, we can observe that, despite the first signals of the current crisis date back the early 1970s, the big war has not taken place yet.
The USSR collapsed, but by implosion, and after 40 years of crisis not a single bomb has been dropped on Berlin, on New York or on Tokyo rather than on Rome, Paris, Moscow or Beijing. Such a long dragging of a crisis had never occurred in the history of the modern Capitalism.
We ourselves that, in the early 1970s, were among the first and most committed upholders that the arising crisis was to attribute to the law of the tendency in the average rate of profit to fall and that therefore the ascending phase of the accumulation cycle begun after the World War II was over, realized that the law was the cause of the crisis, foresaw, in absence of the Communist revolution, in a more or less long time frame, but certainly not of 40 years, that the outbreak of the generalized imperialistic war was unavoidable.
So we could gather that, since one of the most significant previews formulable starting from the law has not occurred, the present crisis is not attributable to the law of the fall of the rate of profit or that the law is groundless.
In truth, in formulating that preview, the fact that crises, with their corollary of wars and destructions, do not bring so simply everything back to the starting point, has escaped or has not been taken into due account, and it seems to us that it still escapes many people; on the contrary they, in addition to a means of destruction, are also a powerful means of acceleration of the development and refining of the capitalistic supremacy forms and so these ones, during the development of the capitalistic mode of production, considerably change. Instead, a correct interpretation of the law imposes that we consider it, otherwise it would be as claiming the past confirms the present when on the contrary it is the present that, in its concrete ongoing, must confirm the law which, once confirmed, enriches in turn with new more and more precise determinations. [10]
So, in these circumstances, it has not been considered that the World War II had not only modified the weight and the role of the several imperialistic powers in the international scenario but it had also created the basis by which, what has perhaps been the greatest change in the imperialistic supremacy forms, could take place: replacing the commodity money with an unconvertible note in the international exchanges. At first the Bretton Woods Agreement and then their denunciation by the USA, have marked an epochal turning point in the history of Capitalism. [11] Without the former we would not have had the overcoming, in the international payment system, of the gold standard, and, because of their denunciation, the definitive achievement, as a means of international payment, of an unconvertible note, such as the dollar, in substitution of the commodity money (gold).
The production of money and of its derivates, at least the one of the greatest imperialistic powers and in particular of the dollar, once it has been possible to produce them, even if not endlessly, notwithstanding the production of wealth of the issuing country, has become, also thanks to the financial market deregulation, like the State securities and/or the titles of share capital and of their derivates, at the same time production of fictitious capital and point of departure for the production of further fictitious capital. That is the most widespread means of international payment has also become the most powerful means to move enormous amounts of surplus value from one side of the world to the other. [12] In such a way, the exponential growth of the financial sphere has been able to connect with the delocalization processes of the industrial production and to feed through substantial sums of the surplus value extorted from the labour force of the areas involved in these processes. [13]
Furthermore, they have deeply changed, creating new convergences and divergences of interests, determined by the degree of dependence of the several national and/or continental economies on the new means of international payment, even the inter-bourgeois relationships on a world scale. New York has not been bombed, but the war, just because these convergences and divergences change permanently with the change of the economic cycle trend of the country issuing the international means of payment, from occasional has turned into permanent. This is, for instance, the case of the oil war which, since the early 1970s, actually, has not had any solution of continuity. In fact, the control of the areas where oil is produced and/or where it passes, since the price of the black gold is expressed mainly in dollars, is a fundamental variable for the determination of the quantity of monetary mass issued by the Federal Reserve and so of all the macro-economical variables referring to the economic- financial process on a world scale.
In any case, one cannot exclude that the generalized war could explode by tomorrow.
So, the law is not unfounded but it has been badly applied by formulating the anticipation only on the base of the abstraction and regardless the current and concrete development of the economic process and of the phenomena connected to it.
And then we have to consider that the crisis, despite the factors which have reinforced all the causes opposing to the tendency in the rate of profit to fall, between highs and lows, has not had any solution of continuity. Indeed, while the Marxist economists are discussing about statistics, there is the imminent risk that it can give rise to an unprecedented social catastrophe: a dark age of Capitalism even hard to imagine.
Marx wrote: “But the main thing about their (the bourgeois economists – editor’s note) horror of the falling rate of profit is the feeling that capitalist production meets in the development of its productive forces a barrier which has nothing to do with the production of wealth as such; and this peculiar barrier testifies to the limitations and to the merely historical, transitory character of the capitalist mode of production; testifies that for the production of wealth, it is not an absolute mode, moreover, that at a certain stage it rather conflicts with its further development”. [14] Is it possible that some Marxist economists feel this horror, too? Or even to think, making a still greater mistake, that the unavoidability of the crisis implies also the one of Communism? “Capitalism – Onorato Damen warned – does not die of depletion or because it has brought to completion its historical class task, it can go on living, as in fact it lives, even if it has nothing more to say from the economic standpoint and in what it concerns the social and cultural development.”
Therefore, in order to avoid the savagery, paraphrasing Rosa Luxemburg, the world proletariat uprising is necessary. Which necessarily implies the program elaboration and the building of the Party of and for the Communist revolution, leaving to the bourgeois economists the debate about the reliability of this or that statistic datum.
Notes
[1] It is worth pointing out here that Rosa Luxemburg develops, in her most important and famous work “The accumulation of capital”, her thesis in opposition on one hand to those of the reformist wing of the German Social-Democratic Party, particularly of Bernestein and, on the other hand of the Russian economist Tugan-Baranovskij who, from a rather scholastic reading of the schemas of the “reproduction of capital” elaborated by Marx in the second volume of “Capital”, drew the conclusion that there were not any limits whatsoever to the development of the capitalistic mode of production and that the crises derived from the rising of “disproportion” or, like someone still maintains today, “lacks of balance” between production and consumption and that therefore they could be avoided, also within the capitalistic relations of production, with a careful planning by the State. If then the proletariat, as a majority in the society, winning the elections, would have taken control of it, with the suitable reforms, a Socialist-type society could have be created by Parliament.
[2] On the law of the fall of the average rate of profit see: www.istitutoonoratodamen.it
[3] More precisely Marx calls the composition of capital – seen on the side of value – composition of value that “ is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into constant capital or value of the means of production, and variable capital or value of labour power, the sum total of wages” and technical composition that is the composition of capital seen on the side “of material” which “is determined by the relation between the mass of the means of production employed, on the one hand, and the mass of labour necessary for their employment on the other” and he calls organic composition of capital the “strict correlation” between the two, that is: the “value composition of capital, in so far as it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors the changes of the latter”. (“Capital” – Volume I – Chapter 25).
[4] Here we suppose that all the surplus-value transforms into profit and all the profit into additional capital, but actually surplus-value is divided into profit, interest and income.
[5] Marx calls absolute surplus-value the surplus-value obtained by prolonging the working day beyond the necessary labour time and relative surplus-value the one obtained by reducing the necessary labour time.
[6] For this last, it is necessary to point out that Marx includes it among the counteracting causes: “But in the sense that these capitals, although invested in large productive enterprises, yield only large or small amounts of interest, […] after all costs have been deducted. […] These do not therefore go into levelling the general rate of profit, because they yield a lower than average rate of profit. If they did enter into it, the general rate of profit would fall much lower.” ( “Capital” – Volume III – Chapter 14).
[7] Op. cit. – Volume III – Chapter 14.
[8] Ref. “Davanti a San Guido”, Giosuè Carducci.
[9] Quotation and data taken from “Titanic Europa”by Vladimiro Giacchè – Aliberti Editore – p. 15-18.
[10] On this important question, see also in this same number M. Lupoli – “Il nuovo realismo”.
[11] it is important to remind that the denunciation of Bretton Woods Agreement by the USA took place in 1971, just after the outburst of the crisis.
[12] On this question see also G. P. “La crisi dei subprime rileggendo Marx”, www.istitutoonoratodamen.it
[13] With the birth of micro-electronics and the revolution of the work international organization and division as well as of the transport and communication system derived from it, it was possible to delocalize most of the industrial production of the more capitalistically advanced countries to underdeveloped areas with even 300 times lower wages.
[14] K. Marx – “Capital” – Volume III – Chapter 15.