[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.

[Author]

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