Patrick wrote: "According to Harvey, the contradictions of capitalism were 'displaced' instead of resolved: they were moved across time and space, especially via hyperactive financial markets. Time is accounted for in the vast credit bubble, which lets you pay now, on the basis of debt, and hope to earn future revenues to cover your loan repayments.
"And capitalism's use of 'space' - geographic crisis displacement - is really what globalization has been about: allowing corporations facing falling profits to seek relief in sites where raw materials and labor are cheaper, where regulations are fewer, and where new markets for products might emerge. Hence corporate profits drawn from global operations rose from a range of 4 to 8% during the 1950s-60s to above 20% by 2000." =========================================== Haven't debt and the exploitation of cheaper markets been characteristic of capitalism from its inception, greatly accellerated at every stage by technological advances in the means of transportation and communication and political and administrative advances in the organization of industry and the labour process, and marked by ever wider crises? Isn't "expansion in time and space" only another way of describing the development of capitalist economies from the local to the regional to the national to the global level? * * * Patrick also wrote in reply to Julio: "But I think the Coxian sense of crisis requiring an exogenous shock to generate a new round of accumulation works pretty well, so I'll keep using it ...As the credit paralysis stretches through its fifth month, a chorus of economists has begun to warn that the world's central banks are fighting the wrong war, and perhaps risking a policy error of epochal proportions. " 'Liquidity doesn't do anything in this situation,' says Anna Schwartz, the doyenne of US monetarism and life-time student (with Milton Friedman) of the Great Depression. " 'It cannot deal with the underlying fear that lots of firms are going bankrupt. The banks and the hedge funds have not fully acknowledged who is in trouble. That is the critical issue,' she adds." ================================================== Isn't your "Coxian exogenous shock" very much like the conservatives' shock therapy - the idea that the system needs periodically to cleanse itself of its deadwood, only "endogenously" as the latter maintain? The conservatives see crises of solvency where others see crises of liquidity. They descend from the 19th century liberals who saw little role for state intervention while the markets self-corrected, unlike the liberal bourgeosie which became ascendent when the Great Depression revealed the dangerous consequences of that approach: prolonged economic stagnation and massive social unrest, the preconditions socialists regarded as necessary to bring down the system.
