The Organic Composition of Capital and Technological Unemployment: Marx's and Ricardo's Intellectual Debt to John Barton and George Ramsay

This paper contends that Marx’s views on constant (fixed) and variable (circulating) capital, the impact of machinery on the working class, and his conception of how the accumulation of capital gives rise to a relative diminution in the demand for labor were strongly influenced by the works of English economists John Barton and George Ramsay. With a few notable exceptions, Marx’s intellectual debt to classical economists John Barton and George Ramsay has been practically neglected in the extant literature. Next, the paper highlights the important influence of Barton’s work on Ricardo’s discussion of the effects of the accumulation of fixed capital on the condition of the working class. Finally, the paper delves into Marx’s theory of technological unemployment (surplus population) and its main components. Again, the textual evidence strongly suggests that Marx was strongly influenced by the writings of all three classical economists on this topic, but Ramsay seems to have influenced Marx’s conception of one of the three major components of the surplus population, viz. the latent component.