CM Part I
More specifically Doug argued:
>State managers, from
>central bankers to armed men, have done a rather masterful job of
>keeping the system from flying off the rails. For a while it looked
>like they'd met their match in the Asian crisis of 1997-98, but the
>worst moments of that are now behind us. Of course it could return,
>of course there could be a crisis that the state managers couldn't
>handle, but it hasn't happened yet.
I see this as the US managers cleverly ensuring that when "a" mass of productive forces needed to be destroyed, it was Asian, especially Japanese. There was some destruction in the imperialist heartland but very little.
So viewed globally the capitalist world is one economic unit with the core of concentration of finance capital in the USA.
The largest mass of capital withstands the crisis best. Bits of US capital had to be destroyed but only bits. The art of state management of this process was to ensure it took place smoothly and invisibly. LTCM was the crunch. It was *both* bailed out and discounted, in one and the same manoeuvre. I stand open to correction on the details but I suggest that is what happened.
The crucial thing that with kid gloves Greenspan ensured that it did not trigger a specifically US crisis of circulation of credit.
Then the downward nudging of interest rates coordinated with Europe, was essentially a slight devaluation of the mass of US capital in order to maintain the circulation of the US economy, the mass of value on the US stock exchanges, and no crisis despite the zero savings ratio of the US middle strata.
Therefore the contradiction between the limited purchasing power of the masses and the need for capital to continue to accumulate, did not hit the US. The crisis has been off-loaded onto other countries, whose masses have suffered a very real reduction in their relative purchasing power.
Meanwhile the mixture of fear and enthusiasm with which capitalism is pouring money into new information technology is a clear example of exploiting new markets. Even if some of this capital is bubble capital, the further widening of the range of technology available to capital in the world to different labour forces, will intensify the process of uneven exchange on a world scale, in which there is a 30 fold differential in wage rates between the advanced west and the poorest countries.
Yes, there is no problem in incorporating state intevention in the model of capitalist cycles, especially with monopoly capitalism now dominant. The biggest task is in seeing below the superficial appearance of the free trade neo-liberal agenda as actually an agenda smoothing the playing field for the giant multi-national corporations based mainly in the west, especially the USA. These giants have planning cycles that straddle the time span of the traditional capitalist economic cycle. Another factor tending to smooth the impact on the west of capitalist crises.
The essence of the dynamic described by Marx and Engels is still there. The workers of the west would have nothing to lose if the wealth of the world was increased vastly by making the most advanced methods of production available to all workers throughout the world. On their own it is hard for the workers of the west to see this. It will require class struggle as well as technical management of what will have to be a process to bring finance capital and land ownership under global public accountability. The politics of this however are already being created.
Chris Burford
London