In the review of the Erwan Moysan book

[ZJW]

In the review of the Erwan Moysan book at https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2020s/2026/no-1461-may-2026/book-reviews-bregman-moysan-brown/:

‘His explanation for the collapse of such state-led capital accumulation was that in the USSR it led to a ‘crisis of absolute overproduction of capital’ — and so to a slowing down of capital accumulation — due to a labour shortage caused by agriculture being so backward that not enough workers were being released to work in industry.  The only way out was abandonment of the type of state capitalism that existed in industry there and a move towards the sort of capitalism that existed in the other capitalist countries.’

Question: what is ‘absolute overproduction of capital’?

[ALB]

Question: what is ‘absolute overproduction of capital’?

Yes, I wondered what he meant by that too. I think he means a state of affairs where so much surplus value has been produced that not all of it can be profitably reinvested. And that, in the former USSR,this arose because there were not enough workers or because of their low productivity.

Elsewhere, there are indications that he adheres to the Grossman/Mattick (and CWO) theory of crises (that they are caused by the rate of profit falling due to the rising organic composition of capital, ie by proportionally more capital being invested in plant and machinery than in hiring productive workers); where the concept of “overaccumulation” is important.

However, this wasn’t necessarily Marx’s view. His theory of crises seems to have been that they are caused by overproduction in one key industry spreading throughout the economy (as opposed to being linked to some slow, long-term tendency of the rate of profit to fall).

The economic reason for the collapse of USSR remains an open question, maybe linked to the refusal of workers there to work harder.

[Erwan]

Hi,

I took it from Paresh Chattopadhyay’s analysis of the Soviet crisis, which I broadly agree with. It’s a term that appears in volume 3 of Capital. Marx deemed there would be “absolute overproduction of capital”, that is to say overproduction that affects not some spheres of production but all simultaneously, if capital has “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”. The idea is that in a situation where there is a little technological revolution (I showed the spread of new technology was stagnating in the USSR) the limit of accumulation is the number of workers. This is the explanation I give for the USSR’s long growth slowdown (also previously shown). Because the transfer of workers from agriculture to industry was slowing down, not helped by the fact that agriculture was not very well developed (which also caused a need to import foodstuffs and cut imports of new technology), there was this long crisis.

Yes, I do link the refusal of workers to work harder to the crisis. One way out of the crisis was the intensification of labour, which didn’t happen, or at least not sufficiently, despite Soviet bureaucrats’ wishes.

[Ciudadano Del Mundo]

I think it was the inefficiency of the state capitalist system

[ALB]

Here’s what we said at the time:

Economic Crisis in Russia

[Ciudadano Del Mundo]

State capitalism was more successful in Germany during the Nazis period than in the Soviet Union. Despite all the military advancements, the soviet union was still a backward country and was unable to compete with the Western powers and the USA. The late soviet leaders did want the establishment of market capitalism, and that was the reason why they did not put up much resistance during the collapse

[Author]

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