Michael Perelman wrote:
What I recall from the Jacoby article was the idea that the German Social
Democrats
argued that they need not engage in revolutionary activities because the economy
would do their work for them.
Hilferding said, in 1910: "If you take over the six Berlin banks you'll
have all of German industry" and that just letting the centralisation of
financial capital run would be smart so there'd be one giant central
bank controlling everything, and a socialist finance minister could just
grab it. Of course Hilferding *was* German finance minister on two
occasions during the 1920s and got diddly from this strategy, he just
paved the way for Hitler with disgruntled forces in the society
*especially after the crisis of 1929-31*, Doug. Which is why your
pooh-poohing these problems, and ignoring their impact upon rightwing
mobilising, is intellectually and politically a bit irresponsible right now.
Doug Henwood wrote:
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.
Ah, we agree to agree, Ok!
In any case,
this essay has held up a lot better than the crisis theorists of old
have.
Is that easy to type because you haven't read Luxemburg?
I looked at Grossman the other week on Rakesh Bhandari's urging and I
just don't see the point.
When I did a PhD on Zimbabwe, I definitely saw the point. I know that
book's sitting in your lovely cluttered living room, so pull it out if
you want to see how Grossman travels. Or read Rick's book, which has
plenty of excellent arguments about the relationship of
political-economists like yourself, and the broader society. Jeez Doug,
wouldn't that alone interest you... or perhaps you'd prefer to be the
Bohm-Bawerk of the Upper West Side instead? :-)
And what about financial crisis?
And what about bigger bubbling and crisis displacement by moving the
cost of all the bailouts around and about.
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:
...
What have the long-term political consequences of these crises been?
Almost none.
That easy to say if you're Manhattan bound, and this year even turned
down a flight to Africa, where the long-term political consequence of
the Third World debt crisis is not 'almost none'. It's millions of lives
lost, man.
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.
No disagreement with the 'crisis in the left' and the unanticipated
extent of class snuggle not class struggle. But the 'crisis' is indeed
in capitalism.
Like I said, the strategy has been with us for as long as capitalism.
Like I said (albeit am yet to prove), and you didn't reply, it tends to
get more severe during periods of severe overaccumulation.
Do you agree with Jim O'Connor that capitalism has been in crisis for
the last 7 centuries?
No, did he say that? Where?
In my view, the proper conception of 'crisis' is Robert Cox's, when the
internal logic of a system is inadequate to get the stabilising and
equilibrating forces back into play, and an external shock outside the
logic of the system (i.e. devalorisation in the case of capitalist
crisis) is required.
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?
Yes, the land dispossessed.
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,
Right. Limits to Capital is no use for figuring out contemporary
capitalism. Must remember that.
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...
No comrade, the crisis is unfolding now, right now, and your fairy tale
of intrinsic US financial power (shared by Sam and Leo) is taking a
twist you comrades didn't expect.
Doug Henwood wrote:
Capitalism was already established in the U.S. when the railroads
were being built, so stealing land, etc., doesn't really qualify as PA.
That's why you should read some Luxemburg, because she corrects that
error. Primitive accumulation is forever under a capitalism that finds
lots of noncapitalist superexploitative possibilities, and needs these
quite badly from time to time. Like now.
