[lbo-talk] Paul Sweezy again

John Mage jmage at panix.com
Mon Mar 8 14:24:34 PST 2004


Doug wrote:

> there's almost nothing in MonoCap about finance, an

> institution that contributes a lot to today's class structure, but

> didn't so much a generation or two ago. Also, the whole model of

> price leadership is extremely out of date.

> And as I wrote in Wall Street, it was admirable to see finance appear

> prominently in the pages of MR, even though it barely appeared in

> MC, because Sweezy & Co. were closely observing the real world, and

> their analysis changed with the times...

Here's Paul (at age 88) to this effect in an interview published in 1999 (but not up on MR's website):

"There are other part of the total picture which, I think, we have only begun to deal with successfully, like the new role of finance in the last twenty years. The capital accumulation process tends to stall in the late capitalist formations. Instead of that resulting in a collapse as it did in the 1930s and a deep stagnation, there's a tendency in the post-Second World War period for this same stalling to generate certain counterreactions in the area of finance...

[W]e have now entered a phase where the transformation of money into more money increasingly takes place without the intermediation of the production phase, the accompaniments of which are extraordinary growth of debt, the growth of financial markets which are totally unrelated to any real production. It's amazing the extent to which it's already happening, by the day, too. Eventually that will probably create its form of collapse, but it won't be the same kind of collapse as we've had before.

Capitalism always changes. It never repeats itself. This whole integration of production and finance into an overall theory of the capitalist process is still something which is in its very infancy. It isn't well handled anywhere. There are intimations of it in Keynes. There are intimations in Marx. But the theoretical elaboration, of course, had to depend on history creating a situation where the new theory was needed. That's where we are now. Harry and I feel that we're probably too old and not nimble enough intellectually to cope with these problems. All we can do is kind of encourage the younger people to think about them and maybe come up with something. There are a lot of new developments, and there should be a lot of new ideas and new syntheses to go along with them. I wish I were young again. I'd like to be at it."

Speaking for JBFoster and the others at MR today, we want to keep this line of development open.

john mage



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