James Wilson's Epistle

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Wed Feb 24 19:37:04 PST 1999


In a most interesting post Vikash wrote:
>
>Many people are fascinated by predicting the next big crash. But what's the
>point, aside from millenarian fantasy? Even if there is a global crash, a
>viable counter-hegemonic discourse to this casino-capitalism has yet to
>materialize. I think that it is more useful to try to understand how this
>international political economy continues to persist despite recurrent
>market failures.

The international political economy can only continue to exist because of recurrent market failures!

Aside from Marx, only Schumpeter argued that recessions, which for him easily spill over into depressions, are *endogeneous* to capitalist dynamics (perhaps some will argue that Keynes also endogenized the trade cycle); moreover, both Schumpeter and Grossmann/Mattick understood that not only the unsaleability of goods during a crisis but also the sale of a larger mass of commodities after the crisis must be explained in their contradictory unity. Crises are not overcome by forcible adjustment of supply to depressed demand.

Schumpeter gives a purely optimistic gloss; they are the means by which society readjusts to a higher equilibrium until taken out again by credit financed entrepreneurs. Schumpeter famously referred to depressions as douches--that is, showers during which the system cleaned away excess capacity (of which Brenner has given a most insightful definition) that had remained profitable due to the boom or inflationary conditions created by credit financed entrepreneurs introducing Innovations.

For Marx, depressions necessarily arise out of and set the conditions for the correction of the general fall in the rate of profit. Crises violently force the centralisation of capital and by providing assets picked up for a song and greater market room to the surviving players, crises set the stage for the a new bout of capital accumulation in which cost cutting technical change may be embodied. This interpretation of Marx is developed by Grossmann, Guglielmo Carchedi, John Weeks, Paul Mattick, and Fred Moseley.

Of course the depth and the width of the depression required to restore profitability may be politically intolerable; moreover, the size of the fixed capitals that represent excess capacity (in Brenner's sense) may be too large to risk liquidation without descent into general economic collapse. There may be for example too much of the credit system tied in with this excess capacity.

There are many important things Robert Brenner has to say in this regard.

yours, rakesh



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