[lbo-talk] spiked-essays | Zombie anti-imperialists vs the'Empire'by James Heartfield

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Sep 5 09:45:29 PDT 2004


Patrick Bond wrote:


>PB: No, it's a coalescence of the left's concern that state actions
>generally follow national economic interests, and that oil will run out,
>hence the US strategy for decades to come is to have Iraq play vassal.

This is controversial, I know, but it's not been conclusively proved that the invasion of Iraq was a project of the entire U.S. ruling class, rather than a hyped-up portion of it. And since things haven't been going well in Iraq, there seem to be plenty of second thoughts in elite circles.

We've got something like 41 years of oil left at current rates of use. Oil will run out someday, but it's hardly the most urgent problem of the moment.


>PB: Harvey argues the world is awash with capital, and that uneven
>development entails various kinds of switches in flows of capital. There is
>no shortage of financial capital bubbling around organically within the US
>(even if US T-bills are purchased by East Asians); witness the real estate
>and mortgage bubbling going on.

Our capital imports have been used to finance consumption more than investment. The U.S. corporate sector has been running a surplus (i.e., internal funds exceed capital expenditures).


>PB: Actually, the profit squeeze is seen as the squeeze that tight labour
>markets or class struggle puts on profits. The overaccumulation thesis -
>that profits stem from excessively productive capital and underpaid labour
>(unable to consume the massive output of the system) - is the opposite.

U.S. profit rates rose from 1982-97, fell into 2001, and are substantially up over the last three years. So how does that empirical fact fit in with the theory?


>PB: One could argue that the overall impact of overaccumulation is going to
>be worse, because the scale of displacement - not resolution - of the
>problem is so much more severe. Just as one example, all the debt ratios
>(which indicate what Harvey terms the 'temporal fix') are far higher today
>in most every country, especially the US, than the 1970s.

True, but when does this become a problem? Is there some magic level of debt that becomes toxic? We could go on like this for decades, for all we know.


> I can send anyone
>a slide show I do on this, if interested. The other manifestations of crisis
>displacement - the search for relative and absolute surplus value, the
>spatial fix through globalisation,

The use of the word "fix" sounds like some underhanded trick. But what if you read "globalization" as a process of the capitalization of everything, over an increasing geographic scope, that's been going on for centuries? Growth in China and to a lesser extent India has been stunning over the last couple of decades. It looks real to me, not like some "fix."


> amplified uneven development, worsening
>'accumulation by dispossession' (including via superexploitation of women)

How's what's happening today all that different from, say, the mill girls of 19th century Lowell, or the homeworkers of the same period?


>all appear far more advanced, and I'd argue that all are the result of the
>general overaccumulation crisis as witnessed by the persistently low rates
>of profit in the 1970s-90s era.

Not persistently - in the U.S., there was a secular rise from 1982, with lots of cyclical variation. Profit rates in the EU are pretty high too, as far as I know.


>PB: Heartfield doesn't understand that a 'speculative boom' is a reflection
>of deep-seated crisis tendencies let loose in the stock market. That's Marx
>101.

So when the bubble broke, why didn't the U.S. unemployment rate rise to a 1932-ish 25%?


>PB: Of course class struggle was the central theme in his work, but there is
>a vibrant literature on Marx's breakdown theory - especially a 1929 book by
>Heinryk Grossmann (which Heartfield's group promoted very heavily just over
>a decade ago).

So is the breakdown coming? If so, when?


>JM: In fact, both the European and American workforces grew - the EU
>workforce by 15million and America's by 27million - between 1986 and 2001.
>In East Asia, and especially China, millions more have been drawn into the
>factories. That implies an expansion of capitalist production,
>
>PB: Sure, but it also implies the search for absolute surplus value, given
>the sweatshop character of those operations. It implies a worsening of
>uneven and combined development, which is also a classic symptom of
>overaccumulation crisis.

Sweatshops don't tell the whole story. It's an empirical fact, not welcome or even acknowledged by a lot of activists, that MNCs operating even in places like Indonesia pay more than local operations. I thought Marx 101 holds, aside from the usual immiseration and crisis bits, that capitalism can develop economies and create new sets of "needs," and that 101 Marxists half welcomed this.


>JM: Whatever the real movement of profits, they are not, in this instance, a
>consequence of the declining ratio of workers to means of production. While
>raging against 'over-accumulation', today's critics have failed to notice
>that the real problem is the shortfall of investment in new technologies,
>the perpetuation of drudgery and the squandering of labour in unproductive
>toil.
>
>PB: The 'shortfall of investment' - because most evidence is of declining
>fixed capital investment ratios during the past three decades - itself
>reflects overinvestment and glutted markets, and that condition hits even
>sectors like ICT, e.g. from the late 1990s, once these overaccumulate very
>rapidly (witness the optic fibre gluts all over N.America).

I hope that James's point is that capitalist social relations are frustrating the potential payoffs of new technology. Don't you agree, Patrick?


>PB: Brenner actually titled his book 'Boom and Bubble' to show that the boom
>got out of control. JM should also consult the data on profitability from
>Dumenil and Levy (Cepremap website), which strip out the interest-related
>(rentier) profits from US non-financial corps and demonstrate that profit
>rates have remained very low throughout the last three decades.

Why strip out interest-related profits? Their source is value production elsewhere, and the financial relation merely changes the ultimate recipient. Actual firms and managers are happy or sad depending on the rate and mass of profit, which has been quite satisfactory since the bourgoisie won the latest round of the class war in the early 1980s.


>JM: Though the old left was providing the intellectual ballast, the real
>meaning of the 'war for oil' slogan was rather different from the
>Marx-inspired analysis of over-mature capitalism. Behind the terminology lay
>the more moralistic preoccupations of the contemporary radical
>intelligentsia with personal greed on the part of the West. According to
>Christian Aid, 'the global economy's addiction to oil - its drug of choice -
>has done more than anything else to skew the world's priorities' (18). The
>war in Iraq was taken as a sign that the West was over-dependent on cars and
>fossil fuels. The real target of the criticism was not a social system that
>stood in the way of economic development, but of economic development
>itself, and of the greater personal consumption it gave rise to.

I don't share James's fondness for cars, but I'm entirely behind the general point.


>PB: The critique is of the system as a whole, which does indeed create vast
>excess 'savings' that take the form of financial market surpluses. Just
>consider how much of this is being invested in the real estate bubble - The
>Economist last year estimated that of a $70 trillion global property
>valuation, about 2/5ths is overvaluation - and you get a sense of the scale
>of the problem.

How important is this, really? We've had many bubbles in many asset classes over the centuries. They burst, periods of stagnation or decline follow, and then the system recovers. Why is every cycle taken somehow to be the working out of some final crisis?


>(13) 'For some of his disciples the "law of value" . seems to assure the
>breakdown of capitalism', chided Paul Mattick, adding: 'Marx's critique of
>political economy became the ideology of the inevitability of socialism.'
>('Value Theory and Capital Accumulation', Science and Society, Winter 1959,
>Vol XXIII, No 1, p 33)
>
>PB: It shouldn't have to take this form, obviously. Since Mattick was a
>Grossmann disciple, I suspect (though haven't read the article) that he had
>a more nuanced take on this than we're getting in the one-liner.

I think the one-liner gets to a fundamental fact: the whole point of FROP theory was to predict the inevitable collapse. Now that people have retreated from that, the whole value-theoretic enterprise looks empty and pointless. It's one of the problems with Shaikh & Tonak's wealth of nations book - what is the point of the whole exercise, other than some clever statistical transformations? And I say that with great respect for Shaikh & Tonak. But I just don't get it.


>PB: I'm not sure there's time today to do more with this, or that it's a
>healthy use of time anyhow, given JM's bizarre political standpoint and
>trajectory. Maybe someone else wants to take up the baton.
>

Despite his allegedly "bizarre" standpoint, James asks some good questions, and I don't think you should dismiss them so lightly. His posish has a lot in common with that of Panitch and Gindin (and me) that powered our dinner table argument in Toronto in the spring.

Doug



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