4. McCulloch
[a) Vulgarisation and Complete Decline of the Ricardian System under the Guise of Its Logical Completion. Cynical Apologia for Capitalist Production. Unprincipled Eclecticism]
“McCulloch, the vulgariser of Ricardian political economy and simultaneously the most pitiful embodiment of its decline.
He vulgarises not only Ricardo but also James Mill.
He is moreover a vulgar economist in everything and an apologist for the existing state of affairs. His only fear, driven to ridiculous extremes, is the tendency of profit to fall; he is perfectly contented with the position of the workers, and in general, with all the contradictions of bourgeois economy which weigh heavily upon the working class. Here everything is green.” (p 168)
Ricardo had changed his position on the effect of machines on the working-class. McCulloch, however, persists with Ricardo's original argument. McCulloch says,
““the introduction of machines into any employment necessarily occasions an equal or greater demand for the disengaged labourers in some other employment” [J. R. McCulloch, The Principles of Political Economy, Edinburgh, 1825, pp. 181-82; quoted by Cazenove in Outlines of Political Economy, London, 1832, pp. 119-20].” (p 168)
As Marx demonstrated, its true that the ultimate effect of machines is to reduce the value of variable and constant capital, and, thereby, to raise the mass of surplus value, and annual rate of profit. It, thereby, facilitates a greater accumulation of capital. The absolute quantity of labour employed grows, even though it falls relative to the total capital employed, and to output. But, as Marx says, this increase in the absolute mass of labour employed benefits not the current generation of workers, displaced by the introduction of machines, but their children. The immediate effect of the introduction of machines is to displace large numbers of workers, who cannot easily find alternative employment. Indeed, the main reason that a period of intensive accumulation takes place is because labour supplies had become stretched, wages had risen, and profits had, thereby, become squeezed. In other words, capital had been overproduced. The new technologies are introduced to remedy that situation, to replace labour with machines, to create a relative surplus population, and thereby to push wages down, and the rate of surplus value up.
Ricardo had been a vociferous advocate of the interests of industrial capital, against the landlords, who drained rent from profit. But, McCulloch, in a period when the landlord class was increasingly intertwined with the bourgeoisie, and where they showed a common exploiters' interest against the rising proletariat, adopts a much more mealy mouthed approach to the landed parasites.
“But his whole tender anxiety is reserved for the poor capitalists, in view of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
Mr. McCulloch, unlike other exponents of science, seems to look not for characteristic differences, but only “for resemblances; and proceeding upon this principle, he is led to confound material with immaterial objects; productive with unproductive labour; capital with revenue; the food of the labourer with the labourer himself; production with consumption; and labour with profits” (T. R. Malthus, Definitions in Political Economy, London, 1827, pp. 69-70).” (p 168)
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