An Empirical Evaluation of the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation for the Current Period of Neoliberal Globalization

• Autor(a) principal: Cooney, Paul
• Data de Publicação: 2008
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista de Economia (Curitiba. Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revistas.ufpr.br/economia/article/view/17168
• topic: pobreza; desigualdade; exército industrial de reserva; neoliberalismo.

This paper first considers the main points developed by Marx in thechapter on the general law of capitalist accumulation in volume 1 of Capital,followed by a discussion of subsequent debates regarding the relationshipsbetween wages, accumulation and unemployment. The second part of this articlerevisits the general law of capitalist accumulation for the current period ofneoliberal globalization. This is followed by an empirical analysis for Latin America,examining wages, unemployment, the industrial reserve army, poverty,accumulation and inequality for the period of neoliberalism. Overall, the empiricalresults for the period of neoliberal globalization in Latin America show an increasein poverty and unemployment and a growing polarization of wealth for theperiod 1980-2002, followed by a slight improvement from 2002-2005, and thusprovide support for the validity of Marx’s general law of capitalist accumulationduring the neoliberal period.