>Right, but we're distinguishing, I hope, between a "profit-maximizing
>strategy" and an accumulation process, right? The former a bank can
>do in the context of control over productive processes during a
>vicious round of devaluation; the latter the productive capitalists
>do with or without the support of banks. I don't want to claim a
>totally distinct set of fractions of capital since we all know about
>interpenetration and the Hilferding "finance capital" concept (as
>flawed as it is). But Doug you'd admit that there can well be a very
>different logic between financial-speculative K accumulation, and
>productive K accumulation, right?
Yes, oh yes. Despite high profit rates and a 7-year expansion, U.S. investment levels aren't all that spectacular. But since I always like to consider bourgeois propaganda before rejecting it outright, you've got to consider the enthusiasts' argument - that by keeping investment down, you avoid what they'd never call an overaccumulation problem. Asia invested at 30-40% of GDP for years, and look where that got them: fast growth, yeah, but low profits and collapse.
>Profitability is one measure of accumulation, but does not take into
>account the variety of devaluations -- Northern worker wages, Southern
>and FSU/East bloc living standards, financial crashes, environmental
>degradation, etc -- that is occuring simultaneously, in order to
>either rid the system of overaccumulation (e.g., the huge productive
>capacity laid waste by technological change) or move the
>overaccumulation problem around through time and space (often through
>credit). In that sense if the rising profits are not underpinned by a
>virtuous set of consumption and production relationships -- what the
>regulation and SSA theorists always look for in their regimes of
>accumulation and modes of regulation -- then the rising profits are
>what Jim Devine has found in the late 1920s, i.e. a distraction from
>the underlying problems of overaccumulation that don't spell revival,
>but more trouble ahead.
People have been saying things like this for over a hundred years. Jim O'Connor once told me that capitalism has been in crisis since the 14th century. Trouble, like the poor, ye have always with ye.
Or, to quote the Engels letter Jim Heartfield quoted:
>Engels described a similar situation in a letter to Bebel in 28 October
>1885
>
>'by choosing to invest his money in this way rather than in new
>industrial undertakings the money capitalist is admitting how rotten the
>whole business looks to him. And this fear of new investments and old
>enterprises, which had already manifested itself in the crisis of 1867,
>is the main reason why things are not bought to an acute crisis.'
1867. We're 131 years and how many crises past that?
>How successful, Doug, if Soros and Camdessus have to keep the Chicken
>Little chatter up regularly to get the bailouts they need?
They get them, the stiffs pay the costs, and the rentiers get richer.
>That's the nub. Global uneven development is a geographical
>representation of moving the crisis around without solving it.
If you're sitting in London or New York and cashing interest and dividend checks, you don't care about the crisis as long as the checks don't bounce. Moving the crisis around - i.e., moving it Southwards, or down the social hierarchy - is just fine by the Council on Foreign Relations, no? Especially if you've got a layer of friends in the zones of displacement getting rich and providing local support.
Doug