Well, I can quite agree with that, but then wasn't it ever thus? I thought the question was whether capitalism had entered a progressive stage of real development, which it quite clearly has not. Parasitism is not the same thing as growth.
For that reason I wouldn't agree with the subject heading. It ought to read Worse times will sustain stock prices. If their really was a wave of productive investment taking place, stock prices would not keep rising.
Charles Brown writes:
"With the revolution in transportation and communication of our times the capitalists, through long distant rapid and precise commercial transport, no longer need the old cooperation ( a lot of workers concentrated in one place; classic factory) to generate surplus value. Plus, the concentration of workers has always been a political problem. Thus, the territorial dispersal of the points of production , plantclosings and outsourcing from old industrial center cities and regions, smaller plants DO constitute a "substantial reorganization of production, " I'd even say a revolution in a dialectical sense of a qualitative change, as it reverses one of the defining aspects of the organization of production in capitalism at its ascent to prevailence. "
I would say that the downsizing and disaggregation of production was more indicative of decay than a new round of reorganisation. That said the one sometimes leads to the other. New points of production and new methods of production would be the indicator.
-- Jim heartfield