Jim Devine writes:
> Given the world-wide competitive effort by capitalists and their
> governments to push wages down relative to labor productivity, it's quite
> possible that capitalism will collapse, in the sense that it did in the
> 1930s. But such a collapse eventually creates forces that allow
> the revival
> of capitalism. The most spectacular in the 1930s was the
> intensification of
> warlike contention between nation-states (including the
> acceleration of the
> rise of Hitler), which led to World War II, which not only created the
> needed demand-side stimulation (military Keynesianism or the
> Permanent Arms
> Economy) but restructured industry and society, allowing a long period of
> accumulation (the so-called "Golden Age"). This kind of collapse doesn't
> encourage the rise of socialism
This talk of a possible capitalist revival is fantasy. There is no
comparison at all between the world of the 1930s and the world of today. In
1931 world capitalism was at the beginning of a long upswing which went
right thru the Thirties and picked up pace remarkably after 1945. This huge
upwave ended by the early 1970s. Inertial momentum, in particular of
population growth, has made net material growth much larger since 1973 than
anything before; but this period coincides with growing signs of
overaccumulation, falling profits, falling productivity and capital
scarcity, the latter phenomenon being particularly pronounced and highly
ominous. These tendencies are not diminishing, they are intensifying on a
world scale. The world-system is in the early, but vivid, stages of profound
general crisis. A general upswing would require a transformed resource basis
or alternatively, a transformed technological base. Neither is in prospect.
The reality of GE, IT etc is of one of economic distocia. There simply will
not be time to mobilise these technologies. When they are mobilised it will
be after, not before, a general crisis and in circumstances which (unlike
post-1945 when new medicines and technologies were massified in a highly
favourable context of social transformation, urbanisation and transformation
of the energetics-base from coal to oil) will be those of urban catastrophe,
ecosphere collapse and energy famine.
In reality, the world faces an unprecedented energy-crunch which will
destroy illusions of future prosperity. Refusing to acknowledge even the
possibility of this to the extent of simply not investigating the facts, is
unserious. To ignore the facts and arguments of the case, is a mistake.
There was NO general crisis after 1931, there was only the gradual and this
time permanent reassertion of world hegemony by the Anglo-Saxon world,
punctuated by partial and local crises. Even the second world war has no
meaning except as the consolidation of US hegemony. There was never any
possibility of US defeat.
Of course, socialism is not inevitable. There can be the ruin of the
contending classes. And nothing guarantees the ruin of the contending
classes more than the abdication of their political duty by intellectuals.
Mark Jones
http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList
