Michel Aglietta

Phases of US Capitalist Expansion

The characteristic mode of existence of developed capitalism is large-scale

industry with its mass production.* Yet capitalist relations of production do not
just arise from thin air. They derive historically from the formation of the wageearning class by the gradual dissolution or destruction of previous modes of
production. This movement, moreover, can never be the exclusive product of an
economic logic. It requires political relations adequate to the domination of the
industrial bourgeoisie, and decisively involves the role of the State. The conditions under which State power is exercised may be more or less favourable to
the implantation of capitalist relations of production on the terrain of the commodity economy. The rhythm and forms of penetration of these capitalist
relations of production form the specific infrastructure of a particular social
formation. It is this social infrastructure that enables us to grasp the differences
17

in the development of the productive forces between different social

formations. And from this point of view, the United States displays major
originality.

The Frontier Principle as a Specific Mode of Capitalist

Penetration
All forms of precapitalist production have agriculture as their productive
base. The fundamental economic condition for industrial capitalism to
develop is the formation of a growing agricultural surplus product and its
realization in the commodity form. In the United States this condition
was enormously favoured by the existence of an immense reserve of
unappropriated agricultural land. Yet it was made a reality above all by
the political origins of the American nation, which united petty
producers with the commercial and financial bourgeoisie in a common
struggle against English colonial rule. This struggle, with freedom of
enterprise as its aim, left a permanent mark on the ideological
representations of American social relations, and created political
institutions governed by those general principles that are the legal
formalization of commodity exchange relations.
The legal subjectivity that reflects the general reification of commodityproducing societies was all the more decisively imposed in as much as
there was no organic tie to precapitalist forms of production. It expresses
the formal liberty and equality of individuals as economic subjects
endowed with initiative, political subjects electing their representatives,
and cultural subjects giving and receiving opinions. The totality is one of
exchange relationships that are formed and unformed by the will of the
contracting parties. This conception of social relations involves an
irreparable rift between theory and practice. At one pole we have a
positivism bearing within it economic utilitarianism and pragmatism, at
the other pole an idealism which in the United States has taken essentially
a religious form. But what is fundamental for an understanding of how
this representation of society was able to impose itself so uniformly is to
bear in mind that it was not merely static, but was tied up with the
expansion of the frontier. The energy that individuals expended in their
economic competition did not merely reproduce a stable social order, it
actually created new social relations.
The Frontier as Ideology

The frontier principle was more than is implied simply by its initial
content, in other words the mere domestication of a geographical space. It
was rather an ideological principle expressing the ability of the American
nation to polarize individual activity in a direction of progress. This is
why the industrial bourgeoisie was later able to get the whole of the
nation to swallow the technological transformations induced by relative
surplus-value by presenting these as the building of a new frontier. The
development of capitalism and the construction of the nation were thus
identified into one process in the popular consciousness. The ideological
* This extract is taken from Michel Aglietta, Rgulation et crises du capitalisme, Paris 1976
(English translation forthcoming NLB, 1979).
18

institutions of capitalism absorbed intellectuals originating from all social

strata; bourgeois representations of the world were constructed without
resistance; the juridical principles of the state took on a sacred and eternal
character. Any questioning of free enterprise was perceived as a threat to
the integrity of the nation.
The liberation from colonialism thus removed the political brakes from
both geographical and economic expansion. Expansion is the dominant
phenomenon of American life; it could almost be identified with the
countrys history. This expansion was the conscious work of broad
masses of the population over successive generations. The community of
petty producers who built up the frontier economy were never caught up
in an agricultural economy geared to mere subsistence. To the extent that
the frontier expanded, with the communications network becoming
denser and structuring geographical space, the relative economic
conditions of the different regions underwent a change. The mobility and
mutual competition of the producers was sharpened by the permanent
influx of new arrivals. This competition for the private appropriation of
the best placed and most productive land gave a crucial role to
speculation in landed property. This activity was fuelled by anything that
changed economic conditions, in particular irrigation projects and the
construction of railways from the 1840s onwards.
The period 18468 saw the end of the Mexican-American war, which
handed California to the Yankees, as well as the gold discoveries there.
These two simultaneous events unleashed an extraordinary wave of
speculation, plunder and monopolization of land by all possible means of
violence. After 1848, moreover, the world capitalist economy embarked
on a long phase of expansion which stimulated American agricultural
production. The space of commodity circulation expanded, and
agricultural prices rose. A massive wave of immigration and migration to
the West in search of profitable opportunity gave the frontier a jolt. Land
prices rose rapidly, and with them the sums paid in settlement of
inheritances. The more land prices rose, the more monetary resources
were needed by new would-be producers or old producers seeking to
extend their holding or move into regions where expansion was more
favourable. The upshot was that the agricultural surplus product had
more and more to take the commodity form and circulate in a wider
space, thus stimulating the extension of means of transport, in order to
bring its owner the monetary yield he needed.
These were the ideal economic conditions for capitalism to take hold in
the new economic spaces in course of formation. Commercial and finance
capital was already well established in the Eastern states, where it
flourished on the basis of international trade. From the 1850s onwards,
the development of means of transport led to the formation of new urban
centres West of the Appalachians: centres which became new sites of
commerce and foci for the formation of new capital, as illustrated by the
multiplication of banks. In California, mining operations and the
expropriation of Mexican latifundists gave rise to an explosive
centralization of capital. But the essential part of this economic
expansion, depending as it did right from the start on the centralization of
financial resources for the extension of railways, was directed by the
19

financial powers of the East. The spearhead of capitalist encroachment on

landed property was the establishment of railway and mining companies,
these being above all else capitalist associations for engrossing the land.
These companies obtained land concessions for the construction of the
transcontinental railways, and the Federal government made them a gift
of immense swathes of expropriated land on either side of the lines. The
railway companies were financed by vast share issues and State loans. The
same company that owned the railway also came to own all natural
resources on the land granted it. These lands, which had been obtained
for free and were now monopolized, were turned to profit by the railway
line, whose construction cost the companys initial promoters nothing.
They were subsequently sold off in small plots at very high prices, or
alternatively leased.
In those regions where land was already apportioned, the companies
managed to buy back the land that they needed at low cost, using every
possible means of intimidation, one of these being to threaten the
population of the towns and settlements along the proposed route that
the railway would be diverted elsewhere if local authorities did not grant
them the land they wanted on their own terms. The inhabitants of these
towns were also forced to subscribe to loans issued by the companies and
guaranteed by public authorities; and municipalities had to devote a good
portion of their fiscal resources to railway finance. From the Mississippi
west to the Pacific coast, railway and mining companies, along with other
financiers involved in monopolizing the land, also had at their disposal
the trusty weapon of control over water. It was enough to seize the
watersheds overlooking the rich valleys either side of the Rockies in
order to ensure control of immense territories; it then became possible to
buy up particularly profitable land, or land with a strategic importance,
and to hold the rest to ransom. The Western states passed very flexible
legislation that closely met the requirements of the dominant financial
groups.
Eventually, the increase in land prices brought small-scale producers into
intensified competition to sell their agricultural product. Local
commodity circulation rapidly became insufficient. The mechanism by
which petty commodity production is dependent on capitalism was thus
clinched by several processes that supplemented the direct
monopolization of the land which we have just outlined. Firstly the need
to expand the circulation of agricultural products put small-scale
producers at the mercy of the railway companies for transporting their
goods, and these appropriated a portion of the agricultural surplus in the
form of prohibitive and discriminatory tariffs, an additional arm in their
strategy of expansion. Subsequently the growth of taxes and rents, and
the need to take out loans in order to finance their own enserfment to the
companies, with the price of land purchase rapidly rising, forced the small
producers into debt vis--vis merchants and bankers. This led to the rapid
spread of mortgages and an increased indebtedness from the need to
repay mortgage loans. By the outbreak of the Civil War, capitalist
domination over petty commodity production was already well
established. The transport infrastructure that provided the precondition
for this was in full development, with the monopolization of mining
20

resources also well under way. The Civil War was to accelerate the
process as well as bringing a qualitative modification.
The Civil War

The American Civil War was the final act of the struggle against colonial
domination. This is why it is legitimate to see it as the origin of the
modern epoch in the American capitalist revolution. The slave form of
production in the South owed its existence and its prosperity to its total
integration into an English-dominated international trade. It blocked the
unification of the American nation on every level, and threatened to put
an end to the frontier expansion. The long phase of industrial expansion
in England after 1849, with its strong demand for agricultural raw
materials, including cotton, actually incited the slaveowners to expand
their domain, and slavery gained new footholds in the lands conquered in
the South-West. In this way it braked the expansion of the textile industry
and other industries using sub-tropical raw materials, as well as
preventing the exploitation of immense mining resources. The
slaveowners also exercised a preponderant influence in the Congress,
sufficient to block any protectionist policy; industrial capitalism thus
suffered as a whole, for the leading industries in the economic division of
labour were unable to withstand English competition. What was at stake
in the war was thus both the direct penetration of capitalism to the entire
Union territory, a policy of commercial protection, and the political and
ideological unification of the nation under the leadership of the industrial
and financial bourgeoisie. The reasons for the political alliance between
the capitalists and the small agricultural producers are clear enough. The
latter feared above all else the extension of the slave system to the free
lands of the West, and the blocking of the sale of public land by a
Congress dominated by the slaveowners representatives. Finally, these
fiercely individualistic petty producers were also very strongly attached
to the ideology and institutions of bourgeois democracy. Yet they were
soon to find out to their cost that this was an alliance with the devil
himself.
The Civil War gave a vigorous impetus to the development of the
productive forces. Economic exchange between North and South was cut
off, and imports from England reduced. The war effort in the North
mobilized all industrial resources and promoted accumulation in those
branches of Department 1 involved in the production of armaments,
explosives and weapons, as well as the extension of communications
routes. There was also a strong military demand for the products of the
textile industry, and for food products, while army recruitment led to a
great scarcity of labour-power. This circumstance favoured a very rapid
advance of capitalist methods of production in the department producing
consumer goods. Mechanization was undertaken in the textile and leather
industries, which enabled women and children to be employed. In
agriculture the strong demand gave a bigger stimulus than ever to
production for exchange-value. Producers became indebted to the banks,
who lent to them in paper money (greenbacks), this being issued as legal
tender so as to finance the public debt.
The immediate post-war period saw expansion continue on a rapid
21

course, propelled by the construction of the transcontinental railways.

Only with the outbreak of recession in 1873, and the long depressed phase
that lasted until 1897, could it be seen that the articulation of modes of
production in the social formation had been profoundly changed. Petty
commodity production had gradually been integrated into capitalist production.
This integration created a permanent tendency for labour productivity to
rise in agriculture, and called forth a major expansion of the production of
agricultural equipment. A strong tendency developed for farm prices to
fall, these settling at the minimum level required to provide sufficient
money to maintain a farming family, plus the valorization of the capital
lent by marketing firms and banks. The fall in agricultural prices was in
turn decisive in bringing about a fall in wages. It not only favoured
accumulation in the department producing means of production;
competition in agriculture also permitted the development of a powerful
foodstuffs industry. One of the main patterns of interaction between the
two departments of production thus found the conditions for its
development much earlier and more far-reachingly in the United States
than in the major European capitalist nations. This interaction by way of
foodstuffs reinforced the radical separation between town and country
required for the extension of commodity circulation in a vast economic
space and for the deepening of the social division of labour.

Transformation of the Conditions of Existence of the

Wage-earning Class
A long historical process which began at the start of the twentieth century
has seen the penetration of capitalist production into the mode of
functioning of the town, and into the production of means of individual
consumption for the broad mass of wage-workers. These two aspects are
closely linked together. They enable us to understand how capitalist
relations of production could spread over the entire field of social
activities, and could subordinate the rationality of these activities to the
equivalence of commodity exchange. This is how capitalism
accomplishes the historical transformation through which it realizes its
potential in the social formation. As long as capitalism transforms the
labour process by the creation of collective means of production, but
without reshaping the mode of consumption, accumulation still
progresses only in fits and starts. The rgime of accumulation is
principally an extensive one, based on the build-up of heavy industry
section by section. The jerkiness is a function of the uneven development
of Department 1, which depresses the overall rate of return on capital and
requires phases of depression in which the value composition of capital is
reduced by the destruction of a portion of the capital invested in
production.
In the United States the most powerful heavy industry in the world was
built up at an exceptionally rapid pace in the last third of the nineteenth
century. This speed resulted from the specific social conditions which we
summed up very briefly as the frontier principle. It also bears on the
particular modalities of the formation of the wage-earning class. We shall
see that these modalities favoured the historical transition of the United
States over to a rgime of principally intensive accumulation, based on the
transformation of the conditions of existence of the wage-earning class.
22

Here we put forward the following proposition (which, of course, still

requires demonstration): When the accumulation of capital finds its
content no longer simply in transforming the reproduction of the labour
process, but above all in transforming the reproduction of labour-power,
this provides the criterion for a new stage in capitalist development. This
stage bears with it quite new forms of the wage relation. It alters the
stability of equivalence relationships in exchange, and modifies the
monetary system. The functioning of the law of value, therefore, the
fundamental principle of commodity regulation, depends on the
conditions in which the wage relation is generalized across the whole of
society.
When capitalist relations of production extend by the production of
collective means of production, then the creation and extension of the
wage-earning class which this movement brings about give rise to a
double structural change: the separation between labour-power and
means of production, which are combined solely in the labour process
under the authority of capital, and also the destruction of the spatiotemporal environment shaped by precapitalist forms of production. This
environment is characterized by close relationships between town and
country; a rhythm of work marked by the seasons and stabilized by
custom; an incomplete separation between productive and domestic
activities; and a domination of non-commodity relations over commodity relations
in the mode of consumption, with these non-commodity relations finding the
conditions for their existence within the extended family and in relations
of neighbourhood proximity.
There is no reason why the two components of the double structural
change mentioned above should be produced together. Capitalism can
implant itself for a long historical period without destroying the
traditional mode of life, even benefiting from the way that labour-power
is reconstituted by the non-capitalist environment in which it is still
inserted. This makes it possible to pay very low wages, and impose very
long working hours. In this period, however, the wage relation is not
fully established. The destruction of the traditional social environment is
produced by the development of heavy industry, leading to the total
uprooting that is characteristic of the wage relation: the separation of
labour-power from all its conditions of existence. The mode of life of the
wage-earning class then suffers a deep degradation. This degradation is
the basis of the gigantic structural transformation that all the capitalist
countries experienced from the end of the nineteenth century through to
the middle of the twentieth with the exception of England, which
experienced it somewhat earlier and over a more protracted period. The
logic of this structural transformation is the production of a new mode of
consumption expressing the complete realization of the wage relation.
This mode of consumption is characterized by the domination of commodity
relations over non-commodity relations. There is no such thing as a consumer
society, but there certainly is a universal extension of the capitalist mode
of production in the social formations in which it is implanted. Capitalism
can only reproduce itself by an incessant accumulation which develops as
a mass production and consumption of commodities, a phenomenon
generalized to embrace the sum total of activities in social life.
23

Transformation of the Wage Relation

To develop the law of capital accumulation and interpret the fundamental

characteristics of twentieth-century capitalism, we must analyse the
transformations of the wage relation from four distinct aspects. 1. The
aspect of capital: i.e. the contradictory evolution of accumulation with its
dual tendency to uneven development in Department 1 and the deepening
of the social division of labour in Department 11 to the extent that the
commodity consumption of the wage-earning class increases. This
involves, therefore, a study of the changing forms of competition in the
context of the increasing density of exchange relations between the two
departments of production. 2. The aspect of the productive forces: i.e.
how production takes place is transformed under the constraint of
relative surplus-value. This involves the interaction between the
transformations of the labour process and the homogenization of the
mode of consumption of the working class. We shall see, in fact, that the
socialization of consumption in the form of the generalization of
commodity relations influences the formation of wages and the use of
labour-power in production. 3. The aspect of wage labour: i.e. the
production of infrastructures, and the creation of new forms of the wage
relation that enable the wage-earning class to purchase all the conditions
of its existence and the general commodity circulation. These
transformations can be interpreted as the formation of a social consumption
norm. 4. The aspect of the commodities consumed: i.e. how the use
characteristics of the objects of consumption are adapted to mass
production, and how a functional aesthetic is diffused that structures the
consumption norm; including, therefore, the rate of penetration of new
commodities as a function of income differentiation, as well as the
socialization of consumption expenditure by the wage-earners through
credit, so as to overcome the obstacle to the acquisition by wage-earning
households of consumer goods whose exchange-value is relatively great
in relation to current income, and to the regularization of the cycle of
renewing these goods by collective responsibility for those risks that give
rise to exceptional expenses.
All these various aspects have to be thoroughly investigated if we are to
develop the theory of capital accumulation into a general theory of
capitalist regulation. Fortunately, there are already several studies in the
different fields listed above. We intend to draw on these, on the basis of
the law of capital accumulation already put forward, with a view to
constructing the more concrete concepts needed to interpret the
regulation of capitalism in the twentieth century. This requires us, first, to
pursue our sketch of the specific characteristics of American capitalism.
The frontier principle has shown us that these specific characteristics
were, in fact, those that made the United States the exemplary nation of
capitalist development, justifying our examination of it in the interest of a
theory of regulation. These features are confirmed by the specific
formation of the American working class and the very rapid dissolution
of traditional ways of life.
Assimilation of Immigrants

The broad mass of unskilled labour-power in heavy industry between the

24

Civil War and the First World War was formed by the assimilation of
successive strata of immigrants of quite disparate languages and cultures.
They therefore joined the American wage-earning class without any roots
in the country. Making use of the political and legal equality enshrined by
the constitutional principles and the American democratic tradition, the
chief objective of these workers was that of cultural assimilation,
according to the ethical norms of the subjective idealism that is the
common basis of ideological representation for all social groups in the
United States. This attitude was all the more marked in that these
immigrants came to a large extent from the central and southern
European countries, and were escaping the horrors of absolutism. The
norms that the immigrants had to internalize so as to succeed in their
cultural assimilation were individualism, the creation of a stable family,
and the predominance of monetary gain as a criterion of social success
and a spur to labour discipline. But they also encountered extremely
harsh conditions of economic exploitation which materially denied
the perspectives offered by political and religious liberalism. This
dual aspect is fundamental for an understanding of the specific forms
and objectives assumed by the American workers movement. This
movement took root in a country where political democracy was far
more advanced than anywhere else in the nineteenth century, and where
working-class organization was for the immigrants at the same time the
bastion of their cultural identity as American citizens. The bitter class
struggles of the 1890s were struggles against the degradation of living
conditions, and were conducted in the name of the principles of the
commodity-producing society itself. Not being waged in any great
degree in the name of a proletarian ideology, these struggles conducted on a strictly economic basis gave a powerful impetus to the
transformation of working-class living conditions in the form of
commodity relations.
Having arrived completely uprooted, the workers of the new industrial
centres had to struggle against conditions of life that had been entirely
imposed by capitalism, in places where no previous urban community
had ever existed. For the three last decades of the nineteenth century, the
accelerated accumulation in Department 1 concentrated capitalist
production around mining resources, waterways and railway junctions.
Working-class concentrations were established at a rapid pace and in the
greatest disorder. As a general rule, working-class housing was rigidly
tied to the factory. Besides being hideous, it belonged to the factory
owners. The latter rented out these dwellings at prohibitive rents, and if
dismissed, the workers lost their homes as well. In the 1890s, these special
conditions of exploitation provoked very hard-fought strikes, and
disturbances that seriously disrupted production (e.g. the Chicago
Pullman strike of 1894). The unhealthy condition of the industrial slums
also became dangerous for the industrial towns as a whole. Finally, the
immediate proximity of working-class housing to the factories began to
impede freedom of industrial location and the quest for economies of
scale that reduced losses of time by the spatial connection of production
activities that were organically linked. This need was supplemented by
that for services in the new industrial towns: sales outlets and urban
transport, improvements of communications between business offices,
and organization of business districts.
25

Around 1900, working-class struggles for decent housing linked up with

a political current inspired by the new bourgeois strata produced by the
industrial revolution, who were campaigning for the establishment of
these infrastructures which the large and rapidly developing cities lacked.
Despite resistance from the financiers and landed proprietors who
controlled the local authorities and strictly limited local taxes, political
pressure on the city and state assemblies of the major industrial states of
the East and Centre-East managed to generate a beginning of public
intervention in housing and urban infrastructure. As the outcome of
political compromise, public housing advanced in waves whenever
movements of industrial activity and population brought the need for
housing construction on a very large scale. The four major waves of
expansion took place at the beginning of the century, after each of the two
world wars, and at the beginning of the 1960s, when new households
came into being as a result of the rise in the birth rate from 1940 onwards.
On top of this, the 1920s and the entire period after the Second World
War saw a strong demand for business offices due to the growth in
bureaucratic personnel resulting from the increasing complexity of the
administrative structure of big firmsand in the post-War period, also
from the gigantic expansion of the Federal government.
Mass Production of Commodities

The extension of capitalist production of private consumer goods also

posed other problems. The advance of the economic division of labour in
this field certainly depended on the transformation of the housing
situation which we have just referred to, and on the provision of urban
infrastructures. But there were more direct constraints bearing on the
production of surplus-value. The material means of consumption
produced on a capital basis are commodities resulting from a mass
production process and designed to be purchased by individuals. Their
incorporation into the norm of working-class consumption is thus their
contribution to the formation of wages. These commodities can only
form part of the consumption norm if their unit exchange value is on the
decline and is already sufficiently low. This requires that the conditions in
which these commodities are produced are those of the standardized
labour process of mass production. And for this to be the case, the social
demand directed towards these branches must be sufficiently large and
rapidly rising.
The squaring of this particular circle takes place dynamically in a nonlinear process of contradictions with advances and blockages. The
process is as follows. The social division of labour in Department 11
results from a differentiation of this department into a sub-department
producing commodities bought by the portion of surplus-value
consumed as income, and a further sub-department producing
commodities bought by the monetary equivalent of the value of workingclass labour-power. This differentiation of Department II itself depends
on a development of the division of labour. To the extent that capital is
accumulated in Department 1 and the division of labour there progresses,
a centralization of capital is produced. This latter makes the job of
capitalist management far more complicated, creating new social
functions both in industrial firms and in the autonomous activities of the
26

service, commercial and financial sectors. These social functions are the
basis for the increase in those salaried social categories who are paid in
part from the appropriation of centralized surplus-value.
To the extent that the centralization of capital progresses, so too does the
sum of surplus-value that is not accumulated, and in particular the
dispersion of this portion of surplus-value among a larger number of
individuals. It is essential, therefore, to note that the centralization of
accumulated surplus-value has as its corollary the dispersion of the surplus-value
spent as revenue. This is how a growing social demand is created for
consumer goods that were previously considered as luxuries, so that these
goods can now be produced by capital. However, the movement of these
branches from the sub-department producing for surplus-value
consumption to Department 11 as a whole does not take place
automatically. When it is realized, in other words when the working-class
consumption norm successively incorporates commodities already in
existence, then capitalist relations of production find their biggest
impetus. All technological progress can be given concrete expression in
the transformation of the social conditions of production. Advances of
productivity in Departmment 1 find their outlets in the expansion of
Department 11. The fall in unit exchange-values in this department
sufficiently increases the production of relative surplus-value to enable
real wages to rise. Accumulation can thus progress at a rapid pace in both
departments. Commodity production invades the entire life of society; all
social relations become commodity relations. The limits to this
accelerated and regular accumulation are those of the extension of
capitalist relations of production to the whole field of social production.
It is from the generalization of capitalist production relations to the entire
social division of labour that the United States draws its advanced social
relations: the rapid integration of agriculture; the absence of cultural
traditions geared to stagnation and subsistence production; the rapid
formation of industrial towns unaffected by pre-capitalist forms of urban
life; the homogenization of successive waves of immigrants, on the basis
of the living conditions of the wage-earning class in large-scale industry;
and a strong centralization of capital, inducing a very early adoption of
new methods of management and sales which give rise to intermediate
wage-earning strata (the famous American middle class into which the
whole population is supposed to melt!).
These structural conditions were further reinforced by the circumstantial
factor of the particular role played by the United States in the two world
wars. The wars considerably enlarged production capacities in
Department 1, brought new methods of production to maturity, and
distributed rapidly growing incomeswhich the war economy forced
into savings, and thus made into potential expenditure to fuel post-war
reconversion to civil production. The 1920s were years of expansion of
the sub-department producing commodities absorbed by surplus-value
in its various revenues. This expansion was the work of the automobile,
of electro-mechanical consumer durables, and the first electronic
products. The development potential of these branches was enormous;
but from 1926 onwards, threatening signs indicated that the development
was being blocked by the limits of the market created by this sub27

department. The working-class market could not yet be reached in the

social conditions of production of the time. But the transformation of
these conditions as a result of the New Deal and the establishment of
collective bargaining permitted capitalist accumulation to go forward on
the entire front of Department 11 immediately after the Second World
War (which created greater possibilities of subsequent development than
did the First). This accelerated accumulation began to get stuck in the
mid-sixties. We shall try and introduce certain elements to help explain
this crisis, by analysing the limits met with by the economy of living
labour and the extension of surplus labour in the context of the labour
processes currently obtaining; the increasing difficulties of further
revolutionizing the conditions of existence of the wage-earning class in
the sense of an ever closer dependence on commodity production; and
the significant rise in social overheads that is linked with the
generalization of commodity relationships.
Translated by David Fernbach

28