Ok comrade, them are fighting words. Let me babble a bit to remind myself of theoretical problems that frankly, even in crisis-ridden South Africa, only myself and one other (Charles Meth of University of Natal) seem to have a vague interest in exploring these days. So it's good to compare notes.
I grant you that there is great nuance in Grossmann's _The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System_ (I am looking at the 1992 Pluto abridged translation -- are you working from the German original? -- there aren't 100 pages on imperialism in mine, just 37).
But I think that given the tendency of the left (myself, at least) to see each downturn and financial bubble bursting as the big Capital-C Crisis -- see, e.g., lbo-talk archives of last month -- our often blunt tools bear some serious theoretical sharpening. Frankly I don't find enough in Grossmann's part 3 ("Modifying Countertendencies") to satisfy me that the intermediate concepts he brought to bear in 1929 -- not just rehashing Kapital's countervailing tendencies but adding "the emergence of new spheres of production with a lower organic composition," "the struggle to abolish groundrent", "the struggle to eliminate the commercial profit," "the economic function of `third persons'", "periodic devaluations of capital", "expansion of share capital" and "the problem of population" -- are satisfactory to the kinds of technical innovations and better understandings we have today of capitalist political economy.
In work on Southern Africa, for instance, I've tried to borrow my doctoral advisor David Harvey's notions of temporal and spatial fixes (Limits to Capital, U.Chicago Press, 1982), which to some extent overlap with the classical Marxian countervailing tendencies (speed-up is extraction of absolute s.v., for example). But there's a lot more to be theorised, surely, than the innovations noted above.
> Now, if by the displacement of crisis you mean the counter tendencies to
> the fall in the rate of profit
No, that's not what I mean, and I think that's what G had trouble with. Displacement is about moving the devaluation of overaccumulated capital around (through time and across space). If you read the section on periodic devaluation in G's Chapter Three, Part One, you'd find it quite static and unsatisfying, in relation to the much broader concepts of valorization and devalorization of space deployed by Harvey (and his student Neil Smith in the book Uneven Development, Blackwell, 1984).
Sure, in the section I refer to, G comments on war in terms quite consistent with the spatial fix: "...the destructions and devaluations of war are a means of warding off the imminent collapse, of creating a breathing space for the accumulation of capital." But in fact there's more to it, theoretically, than this. With spatial fixes come important geopolitical changes in the alliances and internecine struggles that determine the precise form in which devaluation is visited upon a particular region. From spatial fix you get a theory of geopolitics. From G's work you get very little more than one discrete example of a spatial fix.
> What you are calling displacement here Grossmann analyzes in over 300
> pages. Moving the crisis around through imperialism in particular makes up
> over 100 of those pages!
Again, unsatisfying. There's a lot more to the valorization and devalorization of space than that occurring at the global scale -- and "imperialism" as we know it may not even be the most important scale at which spatial displacement occurs. Witness rustbelt-sunbelt unevenness, the evolution of urban-suburban built environments, and a variety of other kinds of financially-catalysed funding ebbs and flows between the "developed" economies. In absolute terms, there's probably just as much devaluation in these geographical terrains than in the South-North transfer of surpluses. To resolve such problems of how global economic managers move the crisis around, there has got to be, you must admit, some theoretical language to capture the process. The spatial fix is a start. G describes only a piece of the fix, never coming close to more general theoretical discoveries.
> However, Grossmann emphasized that the theory of
> credit is what Marx had not lived to complete. Tugan Baranowsky had already
> built credit into his crisis theory and throughout his magnum opus
> Grossmann emphasizes that credit accelerates the development of the
> productive forces and exacerbates the severity of the crisis cycle.
Right, but again as a sectoral -- not theoretical -- argument. By that I refer to G's very valid statement (1992, p.190) that "The limit of overaccumualtion is broken through by the credit system, that is, by export of capital and the additional surplus value obtained by means of it. It is in this specific sense that the late stage of accumulation is characterised by the export of capital." Yes, but what of the role of credit in flowing overaccumulated capital into a variety of other circuits, spaces and investment arenas (not just "export of capital")? I try to capture some of the merits of Hilferding (who G dismisses as a charlatan) and the "finance capital" power bloc by distinguishing between finance as an accommodating function, finance in control mode (Hilferding) and finance in speculative mode (Grossmann). (This typology and an application is covered in my book Uneven Zimbabwe: A Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment, Africa World Press, 1998.) With G, we truly get a monocentric line of argument (that credit systems exacerbate the crisis), and few of the subtleties about how the rise of financial power also changes the terrain of accumulation (as we have seen since the late 1970s) -- which in turn, partly and very unevenly, exacerbates but in some respects also displaces (hence momentarily leveling) crisis tendencies.
> At the same time, Grossmann carries out a polemic against Hilferding who
> sought to replace the workers' direct struggle for control over the means
> of production with the struggle to wrest control of the means of credit
> through the nationalization of banks via a patient and gradual
> parliamentary-legal struggle in a growing (sic) economy; moreover,
> Grossmann attempted to show the limits cheap credit money faces in
> stimulating accumulation.
Yes, that's all fine. A trenchant critique, no doubt, just as you go after the post-Keynesian creditists today. I have no trouble uniting with you here.
> As for speculation, that is built into the core of Grossmann's profit
> shortage theory and given its place in his outline of the stages of the
> crisis cycle.
Right, but perhaps overemphasised, would you not admit, given the ability of the system to keep finding ways to temporally and spatially bail itself out, since speculation began bubbling during the 1980s?
> snip
> At any rate, I agree that Grossmann did not analyze govt debt, but of
> course Mattick did.
Yes, Mattick is a good source to pick up the thematic work of Grossmann. I find a bit of reference to government debt in the essay "Splendor and Misery of the Mixed Economy" (in Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory, ME Sharpe, 1981), but nothing systematic. And nothing on consumer debt and its role in the reproduction of labour; I would say that de Brunhoff, Mandel, Aglietta and Harvey -- writing at about the same time as Mattick -- did more to expand the understanding of consumer credit in crisis displacement. (Enlighten me about other Mattick arguments that I haven't come across here.) But again it's the *spatio-temporal* character of that displacement -- credit allowing consumption to occur now, unevenly across geographical regions, to mop up overproduced commodities, and s.v. to be extracted later to pay for it all -- that is important. Did Mattick get to that at any stage?
> snip
> good nite, rakesh
Sleep well, comrade. Patrick Bond email: pbond at wn.apc.org * phone: 2711-614-8088 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa work: University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development Management PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa email: bondp at zeus.mgmt.wits.ac.za phone: 2711-488-5917 * fax: 2711-484-2729