Replies: "Better times" cannot sustain stock prices

Jim heartfield Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Tue May 5 01:57:58 PDT 1998


In message <l0313031cb173a924e8da@[166.84.250.86]>, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> writes
>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.

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



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