L'economista K. Uno critica Marx. La questione dell'eccesso di capitale

“Marx endeavours do clarify the concept of the excess or overabundance of capital which is the real cause of the phenomenon of crisis (Cf. Capital, vol. III, Chapter 15, Section 3: ‘Excess Capital and Excess Population’). For the reasons mentioned in the preceding note, however, Marx fails to come to full grips with the concept. For example, he begins by asking the question: “Over-production of capital, not of individual commodities – although over-production of capital always includes over-production of commodities – is therefore simply over-accumulation of capital. To appreciate what this over-accumulation is (its closer analysis follows later), one need only assume it to be absolute. When would over-production of capital be absolute? Over-production which would affect not just one or another, or a few important spheres of production, but would be absolute in its full scope, hence would extend to all fields of production?” (Capital, III, p. 251). Marx gives the answer in the following paragraph: “There would be absolute over-production of capital as soon as additional capital  for purposes of capitalist production = 0. The purpose of capitalist production, however, is self-expansion of capital, i.e. , appropriation of surplus labour, production of surplus-value, of profit. As soon as capital would, therefore, have grown in such a ratio to the labouring population that neither the absolute working-time supplied by this population, nor the relative surplus working-time could be expanded any further…; at a point, therefore, when the increased capital produced just as much; or even less surplus value than it did before its increase, there would be absolute over-production of capital; i.e., the increased capital C + ΔC would produce no more, or even less, profit than capital C before its expansion by ΔC. In both cases there would be a steep and sudden fall in the general rate of profit; but this time due to a change in the composition of capital not caused by the development of productive forces, but rather by a rise in the money-value of the variable capital (because of increased wages) and the corresponding reduction in the proportion of surplus-labour to necessary labour (Capital, III, pp. 251-2). It is quite clear that the excess of capital described here is not caused by any ‘internal contradictions’ ascribable to the ‘law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’; it is the excess simply due to ‘capital having grown in a wrong ratio to the labouring population'” [K. Uno, Principles of Political Economy. Theory of a Purely Capitalist Society, 1977]