> for capital. The East Asian crisis, in particular the interminable Japan
> crisis, is a premier example of this process, which impacts what was the
> highest and final development of the _previous_ ("Fordist", or whatever)
> layer of capitalist development. At the same time, as the site of the
> (relatively) "purest" workings of capital, it is also the origin of the new
> crisis (the "New Crisis Economy") which, perhaps, may be unfolding before
> us today in the wake of the high-tech bubble bust.
I suspect there are two distinct sorts of crisis here, the first of which is the long-term issue that East Asia, a rising metropole, is still trying to export its way out of an overaccumulation crisis, while nervously looking over its shoulder at the EU, wondering what the Eurocrats are going to demand in exchange for little favors like bailing out Nissan, Mitsubishi, and the South Korean economy (hint: it starts with an e and ends with an o). Second, there's the implosion of the US Bubble, which has drastically discredited neoliberalism at the precise moment that genuine counter-movements are emerging all around the planet. Suddenly, that multinational market space which the neolibs used so diabolically well to beat down local and national resistance movements, is turning into Capital's worst nightmare: wherever Capital goes, there we working people are.
> To illustrate (without further elaboration attempted here) other dimensions
> of capitalist decay, I would maintain that each successive layer of "new
> capitalist development" occurs within a narrower scope, even as it permits
> greater economies of scale ("concentration and centralization") and acts to
> accelerate the growth in the scope of capitalism as a whole, as well as the
> intensity and scope of "real subsumption".
Sure, technology has gone from measuring millimeters on rail gauges, to nanometers for chip designs, but chips are more ubiquitous than railroads. Reification is a very contradictory thing; in some ways, life in consumer capitalism is infinitely less free than in liberal capitalism (there are all these laws, regulations, restrictions, etc.); but the content of our subjectivity is incomparably richer (better medical care, new and interesting narratives, mass scientific education, and the relative freedom to sit back and complain about all that junk on TV, instead of planting rice seeds or harvesting wheat by hand). An intriguing contradiction, no?
-- Dennis