Re: absolute general law of capitalist accumulation

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A spectre is haunting the developed world - the spectre of the Limits to Growth. All the makers of accepted opinion have combined to exorcise this spectre: market analysts, editorialists, news anchors, economists. But the spectre remains as the economy's problems grow. We are now about to enter the third year of faltering growth. Unemployment has risen one million. The information technology bubble has burst. Corporate profits have plunged. Stock prices and interest rates have declined, and prices at the producer level are stagnant or falling. Is this just another business cycle bottom or something more significant? Growth is essential for both labor and capital. In developed economies job growth no longer results from expanding markets. Quite the contrary: from 1992-2001, industrial production rose 40.1 percent while manufacturing employment fell from 18.1 million to 17.7 million. This is the other side of "increasing productivity". Increasingly today, corporations raise their profits through lower costs-reduced labor but also the "synergies" resulting from industry consolidation that permits the elimination of duplicate activities such as advertising, accounting, and finance. All of these developments eliminated jobs, but the economy was spared the problem of rising unemployment by an offsetting rise in employment in the services sector. The growth in this sector was essential for continued job growth overall. Growth is equally essential for capital. Fundamentally, capital is resources not needed for current consumption. The poorest classes have no capital, but the wealthy classes have a great deal. This capital has one goal: that goal is to multiply itself. In a healthy economy there are many opportunities to invest capital in ways that increase wealth and at the same time multiply capital itself. In a former age that meant building railroads, cities, factories, power sources, etc. More recently, it has meant a huge outpouring of consumer goods, culminating in the communications and computer technology termed "the new economy". As the 20th century closed, it became ever more difficult to find productive uses for capital. Mature industries financed over 75 percent of their investment from internal sources. Overseas investment proved in many countries to be a losing venture because those countries could not earn the money in a competitive world economy needed to repay the money they borrowed. The one sector that was growing - information technology - was inundated with "venture capital" only to end in a bubble that burst with the loss of $ billions of that capital. The ef- fects of this collapse are still unfolding. http://www.comw.org/poc/0210.htm