In the real world, every operating capitalist takes it for granted that the way to gain access to the most advanced technical change is to increase the level of investment in means of production or "dead labour" (including the dead labour accumulated in the results of past research and development). It is only in the pages of the most esoteric journals of political economy that anyone imagines that the way for the Ford Motor Company to meet competition from General Motors or Toyota is to cut the level of physical investment per worker. The capitalist usually recognises that you cannot get the benefits of innovation without paying for it.
For these reasons the average amount of means of production per worker, Marx's "technical composition of capital", will riseand with it the "organic composition of capital". Only one thing could stop the pressure for this rise: if for some reason there was a shortage of profit-seeking investment. In such a case the capitalists would be forced to forego hopes of achieving the innovations possible through greater investment and settle for those they might stumble upon by accident.
The second argument against Marx's account claims that changes in technique alone cannot produce a fall in the rate of profit. For, it is said, capitalists will only introduce a new technique if it raises their profits. But if it raises the profit of one capitalist, then it must raise the average profit of the whole capitalist class. So, for instance, Ian Steedman states, "The forces of competition will lead to that selection of production methods industry by industry which generates the highest possible uniform rate of profit through the economy" .34 The same point has been accepted by various Marxists economists over the last 40 years, for instance by Andrew Glyn,35 Susan Himmelweit,36 Robert Brenner37 and Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy38-and has been elaborated mathematically by Nobuo Okishio.39 They conclude that capitalists will only adopt capital intensive techniques that seem to reduce their rate of profit if that rate is already being squeezed either by a rise in real wages or by external competition. These things, not the organic composition of capital, hit the rate of profit.
The Dynamics of the System
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