ABSTRACT
The relationship between class struggle and technical progress was of the utmost importance in Marx’s Capital, as was the relationship between these factors and the rate of profit. A consequence of competition is that there is a tendency for wage and profit rates to equalise. The rate of profit is the most general indicator of the ‘efficiency’ (from the perspective of the capitalist class) of a given capitalist economy and consideration of this is relevant to understanding Marxian theories of crisis. Marxists have traditionally claimed that there is a long-run tendency for the rate of profit to fall through time, since the organic composition of capital has a tendency to rise with technological progress. This, of course, was only one cause of crisis identified by Marx. This particular view was founded on the belief that the competitive forces compel capitalists to introduce techniques which raise the organic composition of capital, but this would cause a crisis in the capitalist economy as a whole owing to its effect on the rate of profit. Thus: ‘The challenge posed by the classical Marxist theory is to explain the behaviour of the powerful, cutting-edge capitals – the prisoners’ dilemma that turns their individual rational actions into a systematic contradiction’ (Laibman, 2001, p.92).
