Marx, reached great achievements on capitalist accumulation -  on its internal processes (antagonism capital/ labour; industrial reserve army; periodical crises; the linkage between competition, innovations and surplus profit; etc.) and on long term development (primitive accumulation; passages from feudalism to industrial capitalism; role of colonies; concentration; tendency to depression; etc.).

However he missed the growth of human capital (skilled, intellectual and immaterial labour) in the production process. We have seen last year (Storep Conference 2016, Catania) that Marx excludes from the field of productive labour (which produces both social wealth and surplus value): all immaterial works, even if they are part of the collective labour or cooperate within the factory with material work. Thus all sectors referred to commerce, distribution, exchange; services are excluded. Besides, in the schemes of enlarged reproduction, Marx describes the sector of the final consumption goods as made only of necessaries. “Luxury” goods (which include comforts of any kind, even education and health care) are supposed to remain a small part of accumulation, because they, by definition, do not enter in the reproduction process.

But real growth was going in another direction, as it is clear nowadays. There was an enormous increase of skilled work relative to the unskilled; a great increase of services. This caused a permanent growth of education; while the need to increase in productivity caused a huge growth of research and technological labour. All this also caused on turn a growth of administrative functions, inside and outside factories and in the state.

Technical progress and productivity growth relied no more on the quantitative and value increase of constant capital, but on the drop in the cost of production through the reduction in value of the means of production; which means a progressive transfer of investments from constant capital to human capital.

The utmost point of this process was reached with the welfare state. The welfare state dismantled the increasing dualism between intellectual and elementary labour. It increased enormously the general productivity in developed societies.

But Marxists did not understand this radical change. Conditioned as they were by Marx’s restrictive statements, they discussed up to the exhaustion about immaterial labour, whether it is actually productive; labourers in commerce who produce profit for their employers but not for society; technicians who foster production but are unproductive; teachers or doctors who increase or preserve workers’ productivity but are an unproductive cost for capital; housewives who help the reproduction of labour force but do not contribute to social surplus; etc.

Most of the Marxists interpreted the expenses for the welfare state as unproductive expenses to contrast the falling profit rate. Welfare expenses were put together with armaments and subsidies to private enterprises, as a new burden on the shoulders of the diminishing material workers.

Probably 1970s Marxism went into crisis, not for the debates on labour value or the transformation problem, but for the total misunderstanding of the welfare state.