No I haven't. But I am not surprised to learn of specific areas of capital destruction within the USA. What would be more perilous for the US economy would be if there were no local areas of destruction at all to balance out the areas of growth. Even as imperialist hegemon the USA would have to be exceptionally lucky if all the destruction of capital was borne by other countries. Even if you emphasise the size of losses within the USA I would still wish to assert that in aggregate they are small relative to the massive losses suffered by other countries in this crisis. I would still assert that the USA has come out with its hegemonic position strengthened, and ultimately it is that is has kept its stock of capital together best of all, even if there have been subordinate revolutions within that stock of capital.
>Because the dollar is strong esp in relation to 'third world'
>currencies due to its role as intl reserve currency, the pricing of oil in
>dollars and the US monopoly over advanced weapons system, US capital can
>take advantage of the intl division of labor and get fat on cheap imports
>in dollar terms, sometimes as sophisticated as basic memory chips, from
>subsidiaries or foreign companies, thereby streamlining the mfg sector.
Absolutely. The advantage of having the world reserve currency is worth at least 10 billion dollars a year to the US balance of payments, and that must have a multiplyer effect on the economy too. It is essentially free loans by the rest of the world to the US.
>
>Due to a global slump, the advanced capital goods sector has not
>grown sufficiently to absorb displaced workers (as the Keynesians would
>put it, it's not a supply shortage of skilled labor but a lack of
>investment demand that's the problem on a global scale,
The fundamental contradiction between the limited purchasing power of the masses and the need for capital to accumulate surplus value.
>No matter how well American capital can weather the storm, the condition
>of the American working class overall has grown more insecure and
>degraded--though presently somewhat masked by the wealth effect from the
>bubble created by the global flight for quality.
Yes, though while the total value in circulation may be a zero sum game, increases in productivity do produce increases in wealth in the sense of the total mass of use values.
>The underlying
>degradation is sure to soon manifest itself.
So if people are getting increased use values in the USA they may tolerate even more insecurity and a wider range in the labour market.
>> So viewed globally the capitalist world is one economic unit with the core
>> of concentration of finance capital in the USA.
>
>Yes, all those transactions in dollars due to intl role priviliges
>American finance capital but the strength lent to the dollar thereby is
>not a blessing for the American working class.
We are on the edge here of the economic basis for opportunism. I agree that the US working class should not be dismissed or belaboured for its lack of revolutionary fervour. I do not think the material blessings of being workers in the leading imperialist country are really in the form of bribes. But it certainly compromises their internationalist perspective.
[All the same remarks could be said of British workers but Britain is obviously a second rate power in the orbit of the US, and for brevity I do not add this routinely.]
>> The crucial thing that with kid gloves Greenspan ensured that it did not
>> trigger a specifically US crisis of circulation of credit.
>
>
>>
>> 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.
>
>We need to elaborate the exact mechanics of this.
If possible, yes. But it may not be possible to elaborate the "exact" mechanisms of this for it to be true and a crucial perspective, without which all empirical studies will flounder.
We are talking about the interaction of many variables here. Even in terms of Newtonian mechanics, the three body problem states that it is not possible precisely to predict the location and movement of three bodies orbitting each other if you know their mass and their acceleration. How much more complicated is the interaction of economic variables.
The application of marxist economics on a world scale must be essentialist. It must posit that there is a total mass of exchange value which is distributed between countries and classes as a zero sum game.
This is modified only by conditions that do not fundamentally alter the model: these conditions are that exchange value is expressed in money and this may increase with an increase in the use values in circulation that results from increased productivity.
Further certain forms of the total social life process that were formally done by labour but not by labour power purchased as a commodity, may come to be commercialized as services or goods. This increases the ratio of products of labour deriving from commodity exchange relative to the products of labour not deriving from commodity exchange.
I am trying to use this terminology correctly. I accepted the thrust of a long exchange of letters with Andrew Kliman that Marx reserved the term value for commodity exchange. The wider concept is of products of labour.
Certainly some of the "exact" mechanisms by which value is continually transferred from the periphery to the imperialist centre can be identified. These include massive capital movements subsidized and supervised by the IMF, currency speculation, transfer pricing by multi-nationals, and the ever changing terms of trade.
This last is more a general phenomenon of commodity exchange than a specific mechanism. In an economy in which the means of production are being continually revolutionised, the producers with the newer technology always enjoy a relative monopoly that takes time to even out, depending on the speed of movement of commodities, capital, and labour. So unfinished raw materials generally fall in value relative to the total stock of world value, except briefly at the height of the cyclical booms.
These seem to me the underlying processes of uneven exchange on a world scale and why the burden of the crises are most likely to be borne by the third world, the poorest of the workers, and women.
Chris Burford
London