Surely at the level of stabilising and reproducing capitalism as a system, it is not terribly important whether it is corporate, consumer or government debt doing the temporal displacement of overaccumulation. It is important mainly to show a Minsky-style rise in debt ratios (from hedge to speculative to Ponzi) for the system as a whole, and the parallel rise of other forms of fictitious capital (paper representations of K) like shares and real estate titles and derivatives. Would this not qualify as the central reason for the last two decades of crisis displacement, and combined with the various means of moving the crisis around geographically (not merely imperialist restructuring but also all the other spatial techniques of valorisation and devalorisation), can our failure to recognise this not explain why we've been calling 45 of the past one depressions, as you put it?
The translation of Grossmann's book in English in 1992 was a reminder of an earlier set of debates, but there was a distinct failure in earlier marxian political economic theories to attribute uneven geotemporal development to the displacement of the overaccumulation problem. I would take Grossmann's book as the most advanced characterisation of the problem, but surely Rakesh you could concede that it was an incomplete and sometimes conjunctural read of the dynamics of the crisis?
But even if we're more recently getting a handle on the spatial and temporal aspects of uneven development, and if likewise a 1970s generation of theorists revived classical marxian insights (including Hilferding's) on disproportionalities and the uneven development of sectors, the other crucial element of crisis formation, displacement and resolution that we haven't done terribly well to theorise so far is the uneven development of *scale.*
I think finance is terribly important to the ways in which the global scale has emerged over the past two decades, and in which that of the nation-state has fallen. But my geography colleagues also talk of glocalisation, and particularly the way cities are inserting themselves, through various forms of interurban entrepreneurial competition, into the int'l division of labour.
But while I take a stab at this in the Uneven Zimbabwe book, it is still unsatisfactory. Who do LBOers talk about when it comes to *theorising* why we have such momentous scale shifts every few decades, first in one direction, then back to a reassertion of traditional geopolitical units like the nation-state (like the 1920s to 1930s shift) -- and are we ready to make that shift again?
P.
> Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>
> > The Marxist argument (I believe) is not that a balanced budget would
> >improve economic performance; rather the argument is that overcoming
> >stagnation and downturns through deficits tends to create its own
> >problems over time (heightens the contradictions and all that):
>
> I don't disagree with that at all. I was just objecting to your claims
> about the present fiscal situation of the U.S., which is actually quite
> sound by conventional measures.