>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 07/12/99 03:10PM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:
>For the sake of argument, lets say I am trivializing the use of the
>word "crisis". Are you saying that Marx used the word in the
>trivialized way in his theory of business cycles or are you saying
>that Marx reserved the word "crisis" for events such as the "10-15
>times worse Depression" ?
Doug: 19th century "contractions" were pretty nasty. Obviously the numbers are pretty spotty, but in the U.S., nominal GDP fell 5% 1873-74, and 10% from 1882-85; real GDP fell almost 7% from 1892-94. (I don't have real estimates before 1890.) There were massive bank and business failures. State intervention has succeeded in taming those in the First World - obviously not in the Third, where state intervention has often created depressions to turn trade deficits into surpluses and free up foreign exchange for debt service.
My whole point in this was that Marx grossly underestimated the power of the state to keep capital from eating itself.
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Charles: It seems to me that the power of state intervention is analyzed in Lenin's concept of state-monopoly capitalism.
I truly think this is the sense in which Marxism is different than bourgeois theories. This is part of the meaning of dialectic. Marx understood his theory as teaching at a fundamental level that the theory itself would change based on the real developments of capitalism. Marx anticipated a Lenin who would retain the fundamentals such as wage-labor and surplus-value extraction (Chapter one of vol. one of Cap.) and yet take account of the development of a capitalism relatively independent of the state (laissez-faire) to state-monopoly capitalism, in which the state more and more directly serves the interests of the bourgeoisie from imperialist war to Keynesian (?) regulation of the economy through fiscal and monetary policy. The closer state involvement in the capitalist economies starting in the 1930's is a direct fulfillment of the implications of Lenin's theory of state-monopoly.
My main point would be, of course, regarding, the unique significance of Marxism's dialecticality being that the theory anticipates self-changingness.
>In terms of severity percentages, how does Russia of the last 10
>years compare to the great Depression ?
Doug: Worse. Their real incomes are off by about 50%, twice as much as the U.S. Great Depression.
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Charles: To me this suggests a way to apply Marxist fundamentals, but not dogmatically identical to Marx's discussion of crisis in his lifetime. or even Lenin. Characteristic of the current period is that the main capitalist center,which is especially the U.S. , has through such things as its economic science (including learning capitalism from Marxist economics) figured out how to pass off the big crisis which must occur somewhere in the system to impact the various neo--colonies and semi-neo-colonies. This is the job of IMF, World Bank, U.S. Treasury, World Trade Organization, NAFTA, new GATT, potentialy MAI, the new transnational state organs. Specifically, the current "cyclical": crisis is exploding partly in Russia. But the existence of this modified configuration of crisis in relation to the nation states of the 1900's is confirmation of Marx's prediction that crisis is inevitable under capitalism, even though it is post-modern form crisis (especially with respect to ! ! national boundaries and the system of states from the 19th Century or early 20th Century)
>The below is confined to the U.S. Isn't the non-dogmatic application
>of Marxism today to consider the world economy as a whole....
Doug: Always has been, always will be.
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Charles: I take your point. But surely there is a qualitative newness to the global economy of 1999 from the time of the capitalist world system of the Manifesto. I'm for holism, but one of the important points to avoid dogmatism here is to analyze the reconfiguration of the world system, even though " workers of the world , unite "is trueer today than in 1848.
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According to the IMF, world growth was 0.5% in 1991 and 0.8% in 1992, the most recent years of full-blown recession. Africa's figures were 1.8% and 0.2% respectively; LatAm and the Carib, 3.9% and 3.3%. For 1998 and 1999, the IMF estimates world growth at 2.5% and 2.3%. These are low numbers, but they're a long way from 19th century panics or Russia's 1990s collapse.
According to the World Bank, 58% of Chinese and 88% of Indians live on less than $2 a day, a common measure of international poverty. They don't provide aggregate figures, but from scanning the table, it looks like around 75% of Africans fall under this poverty line. This is a horror and a crime, but I'm afraid it's all too normal.
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Charles: I wouldn't disagree with this unless I was a sectarian. I 100% agree that mass econmic horror and crime are continuous when the capitalist system as a whole is considered, from Marx's day to today, but just in a different way today than then. This is a point of unity . I see a key project for those economists in the Marxist tradition, to demonstrate how Marx's fundamental logic , developed based on the principle of anti-dogmatism, explains these new configurations of crisis AND continuous misery for masses, the new pockets of wealth which the capitalists have blocked in Funds, not only for themselves , but to cleverly placate whole nations of workers, especially, in the U.S. and the West. Lenin very much discussed this bourgeoisification of pockets of workers; in that he specifically quoted Marx and Engels discussing "bourgeoisification of British workers." It seems to me the potential displacement or externalization of crisis to neo-colonies and semi-colonies is par! ! tially anticipated by Marx and Engels in this observation. Their theory was not only open to but had as a basic principle the possibility of the current radical reconfiguration of capitalist hegemony and therefore the need of a new Marxist theory for the convulusion of the unfolding (development of) capitalism in actual history and in each historical period. This is part of the meaning that Marxism is not a dogma but a guide to action, as Engels put it.
CB