> > Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 18:19:57 -0700
> > From: Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > Unfortunately for Marx, his volume III theory of the rising organic
> > composition of capital doesn't work very well on either a theoretical or a
> > practical level. Not only can the capitalists compensate for any rise in
> > the organic composition of capital by cutting wages relative to
> > productivity (raising the rate of surplus-value),
Patrick wrote:
>Jim, there are always countervailing tendencies (absolute/relative
>s.v. extraction), of which I think the most important since the
>current int'l slowdown in accumulation began three decades or so ago,
>has been the temporal/spatial *displacement* of the devalorisation of
>overaccumuled capital. Third World lending has been one vehicle
>(even if not, in the whole scheme of things, a particularly large one
>in volume terms... but we've really felt it down here!).
right. -- all of the stuff below also basically involves agreement with
Patrick's position.
>Consider, for instance, the Suter/Eichengreen studies of financial
>crashes: every 50 years like clockwork since 1820s, involving 1/3 of
>all nation-states (the WB's 2000 Global Finance report actually
>promotes the financial-Kwave theory, I guess because Stiglitz still
>had his hand in and Eichengreen refused to draw the logical
>conclusions). It seems that the big difference during the 1980s was
>the concentrated power of the WB/IMF--as cops for NY/London/Frankfurt
>banks--to NOT ALLOW the devalorisation of financial capital by
>instead rescheduling debt (Nyerere and Castro failed to get the
>debtors' cartel up and running).
>
>But the point here is that this process of displacing the
>overaccumulation crisis South didn't solve it. Racing to repay
>unpayable debt, the Third World glutted most raw material and light
>mfg. markets. So the displacement -- the recent spatio-temporal
>countervailing tendencies Marx did not really foresee or theorise --
>simply means that the overaccumulation problem grows worse, right?
it's true that spatio-temporal displacement doesn't solve the problem -- so
that it makes crisis tendencies worse, since imbalances continue to
accumulate. But my point was only that Marx's theory wasn't very good. I'm
not going to get into all that argument here, but I agree with the
literature's almost-consensus. That does not mean that I reject the
capitalist tendency toward crisis, though, as I noted in my original
message. My point is that the capitalist tendency toward crises causes
repeated crises rather than automatic breakdown.
> > but any crisis that
> > occurs purges imbalances from the system, destroying capital and allowing
> > accumulation to recover -- to drive itself into crisis once again.
>
>A matter of the balance of class forces, right? Including territorial
>struggles? So, that's why helping to more surgically identify the
>pockets of resistance and empower them--instead of comrade Chris'
>utopian global-regulatory strategy--becomes ever more crucial. To
>link the pockets of resistance obviously also calls for the need for
>solidarity--the globalisation of people (not of capital or state
>functions, which will overwhelm us if they maintain their
>current international capacities, without nation-states reigning in
>capital, e.g., through a new round of exchange controls).
right.
> > Even this doesn't inevitably lead to capitalism's demise. Instead, it
> > encourages collective solutions, i.e., the monopolization of markets and
> > the rise in the role of the state. The last time capitalism had a gigantic
> > Crisis -- the 1930s -- it encouraged the rise of state solutions, from
> > social democracy to fascism, with the U.S. New Deal in the middle, on a
> > national level. The next Crisis will likely see its solution on the global
> > level, as seen in embryonic form in the Kyoto accords. (Somehow, the
> > Bushwackers aren't anti-abortion on _this_ issue.) If the current US
> > slowdown turns into a global depression, it encourages further development
> > of collective control, perhaps the creation of a global Fed. "Human
> > ingenuity" would show up in the form of a New Bretton Woods conference, a
> > global-statist version of social democracy or fascism or something
> > in-between. This eventually would allow the re-establishment of capitalist
> > accumulation ....
>
>Why are you so sure, comrade Jim, about global "solutions"
>(restructuring of relations of production)? The old familiar
>intercapitalist-competition plus bloc-formation process plus
>geo-military conflict seems just as likely, doesn't it?
I'm not "sure." The capitalists unite to solve problems (as when the elites
united circa 1945 to form NATO, Bretton Woods, etc.) But you're right that
competition re-asserts itself. Where I had an ellipsis, I originally said
something about the eventual rise of neo-neo-liberalism, which will come
(roughly) 25 years after the new global collective solution and roughly 25
years before the next global collective solution. I elided this because it
seemed too speculative (even for me).
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
