"Sweezy identified the problem, but only partly. In our opinion, the issue is not to understand the INTERACTION between the “real” and the “financial,” but to RETHINK these very concepts. That is what we attempted to do. "
If I am understanding this train of thought correctly, It's not just about the accumulated capital, goods, financial instruments... stuff. But it's also about a culture or society's "interaction" with said "stuff", which is in flux and requires "rethinking"??
??? Leigh Meyers leigh_m at sbcglobal.net
----- Original Message ----- From: Jonathan Nitzan To: LBO Sent: Monday, December 27, 2004 10:58 PM Subject: [lbo-talk] New Imperialism or New Capitalism?
I would like to clarify a few points regarding my KPFA interview, as well as our recent manuscripts “New Imperialism or New Capitalism?” and “Dominant Capital and the New Wars”.
http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/archive/00000124/ http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/archive/00000001/ http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/archive/00000125/
These works are not meant to be “provocative” or “contrarian.” The key issue is not “prediction” or “conspiracy theory”. We do not seek to accumulate intellectual capital, nor do we wish to undermine the feeble unity that exists among radical thinkers and activists.
Our purpose is constructive. Very much in the spirit of Marx, we seek to create a new dialectical understanding of capitalism. And a new way indeed seems necessary.
The US invasion of Afghanistan/Iraq exposed a deep fracture in Marxism, a fracture between a theory enumerated in invisible (and in our view impossible) units of “abstract labor” and an observable reality of pecuniary accumulation. Over the past several years, Marxists have produced ample analysis of the “new imperialism”, all solidly cemented in Marxist jargon. But with the fracture unresolved, jargon has become a fetter. The sad fact is that none of this analysis has been able to show how, starting from value, the new global bellicosity fits into the financial reality of accumulation (of course, unless you are willing to take the author’s word for it).
More than a decade ago, Paul Sweezy, one of the more innovative Marxists of the twentieth century, had this to say about this fracture:
“Why did Monopoly Capital fail to anticipate the changes in the structure and functioning of the system that have taken place in the last twenty-five years? Basically, I think the answer is that its conceptualization of the capital accumulation process is one-sided and incomplete. In the established tradition of both mainstream and Marxian economics, we treated capital accumulation as being essentially a matter of adding to the stock of existing capital goods. But in reality this is only one aspect of the process. Accumulation is also a matter of adding to the stock of financial assets. The two aspects are of course interrelated, but the nature of this interrelation is problematic to say the least. The traditional way of handling the problem has been in effect to assume it away: for example, buying stocks and bonds (two of the simpler forms of financial assets) is assumed to be merely an indirect way of buying real capital goods. This is hardly ever true, and it can be totally misleading. This is not the place to try to point the way to a more satisfactory conceptualization of the capital accumulation process. It is at best an extremely complicated and difficult problem, and I am frank to say that I have no clues to its solution. But I can say with some confidence that achieving a better understanding of the monopoly capitalist society of today will be possible only on the basis of a more adequate theory of capital accumulation, with special emphasis on the interaction of its real and financial aspects, than we now possess” (Paul M. Sweezy, 1991, “Monopoly Capital After Twenty-Five Years”, Monthly Review, Vol. 43, No. 7).
Sweezy identified the problem, but only partly. In our opinion, the issue is not to understand the INTERACTION between the “real” and the “financial,” but to RETHINK these very concepts. That is what we attempted to do.
<>It may be more exciting to criticize the "imperialists" and their ideologues, but that critique will not lead very far unless we are also willing to criticize ourselves.
Jonathan
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