On Dec 22, 2007, at 10:21 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
Doug Henwood wrote:
According to Jacoby,
whose staying power hasn't been so great...
Dunno what you mean by this. His book on the American banalization of
psychoanalysis, which I read long ago, was great, and this essay is
pretty fine stuff too. If you mean his devolution into his present
state - urging leftists to read Strunk & White, as Adolph Reed put it
when he recommended this crisis essay to me - then ok. In any case,
this essay has held up a lot better than the crisis theorists of old
have.
so maybe take some time this
holiday to read these folk, seeing as how a serious financial
crisis is
bubbling over. Their work's online for the most part.
I looked at Grossman the other week on Rakesh Bhandari's urging and I
just don't see the point. There's plenty of point to reading Marx
today - there's something illuminating, even profound, on almost
every page he wrote. But his minor epigones? I'm reminded of Hillis
Miller's question - with so much Shakespeare to read, why bother with
Beaumont & Fletcher?
And what about financial crisis? Lehman Bros. did a count recently
and came up with 30 of them since 1900, or one every three years. Off
the top of my head, I remember these since the early 1970s:
* Bretton Woods/gold converibility
* Franklin National
* Penn Central
* Mexico/Third World debt crisis
* Drysdale/Chase
* Penn Square/Continental Illinois
* stock market crash
* S&Ls
* junk bonds/LBOs
* Scandinavian banks
* Mexico
* East Asia
* Russia/LTCM
* dot.coms/NASDAQ
* etc.
What have the long-term political consequences of these crises been?
Almost none. Sam Gindin said two striking things in that Brecht Forum
debate with Brenner: 1) the crisis isn't in capitalism, it's in the
left; 2) if you'd told him in 1975 that the U.S. working class would
take 30 years of falling real wages, union busting, benefit cuts, and
rising insecurity, he wouldn't have believed you.
but that can't be explained without looking at the subjective factors,
especially German social democratic and communist strategies, so no
one
I know would argue that you simply read off a revolution from a
capitalist crisis. Who do you know that would say something so daft,
Doug? And if you don't, isn't it a red (or maybe white) herring?
I see it in the way you & others vibrate with excitement every time
the financial markets take a spill.
I gotta say, as much as I admire Harvey, I find "accumulation by
dispossession" to be a grand-sounding but fairly empty concept.
First, it's just part of the story associated with overaccumulation
crisis displacement. The empirical question, which none of us have got
to satisfactorily, is how *much* does the renewed surges of primitive
accumulation shore up profits and create economic 'values' that
underlie
fictitious capital formation.
Like I said, the strategy has been with us for as long as capitalism.
Do you agree with Jim O'Connor that capitalism has been in crisis for
the last 7 centuries?
It's not a reaction to crisis, just a way to get
stuff for free and make money on it. It's a foundational principle of
the USA, from slavery and Indian genocide through the building of the
railroads ...
That's the primitive in primitive accumulation.
The railroads? Primitive?
Taking Harvey's spatial work on the displacement of overaccumulation a
bit more seriously, e.g. in the last chapters of Limits to Capital,
might be another good xmas break challenge, comrade.
I read that long ago, and I don't feel any urge to revisit it. I'd
rather try to figure out how capitalism works today, and who
constitutes the U.S. ruling class today. I sometimes think that these
crisis theories serve a kind of fairy tale role for a dwindling band
of true believers. "Once upon a time," sometime in the future...
Doug
