I'm not denying that - not that I've read Klein's book, but I've met too many people who are sucked in by the surface appearance of capital and fail to analyse the social relation in its entirety. However, Bello is basically falling back on a traditional theory about the crisis which fails to capture some important dynamics of modern capitalism. The 'crisis of overproduction' explanation has a lot of truth to it, but runs the risk of treating capital as a thing, rather than a social relation - the result is a view of the development of capital which overemphasises fixed laws, and de-emphasises the dynamic nature of capital.
>From what I've heard, Klein's book captures an important element of
modern capital, so I think it is worth trying to work back from the
logic of the Logo, rather than putting the focus on capital goods.
What are the implications of capital goods becoming ever more
undifferentiated, ever more in surplus? Surely it is the extension
of the leverage that the New Brand capitalists possess? (E.g. at current
rates of capacity increase, Intel's position as an 'old style'
brand is likely to vanish in the next 10 years as computer processing
power outstrips demand.) Capital as a social relation requires
constant activity to keep seperating dead labour from living labour -
with new forms of dead labour increasingly being highly transportable
forms of Intellectual Property, we can look forward to new terrains
of contestation, new alliances against capital, etc.
I think the current interest in Klein, Negri & Hardt, et al. is pretty much an index of the awareness people have of these new developments.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844 k*256^2+2083 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B