Patrick Bond's comments on my article 'Zombie anti-imperialists take on the Empire' http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA6BA.htm seem more picky than thoughtful.
Most damningly, Patrick fails to understand that there can be no epoch of transition without a subject of transition. Without a revolutionary challenge to capitalism, all of its difficulties are only relative, and can be overcome. Patrick tries to pooh-pooh the real expansion of capitalism in the last ten years, failing to understand that it was the defeat of organised labour in the preceding period that made this expansion possible.
I said 'it is wrong to say that the USA is awash with capital, overflowing into the less developed world. In fact, America is a net importer of capital, dependent upon foreign purchases of US treasury bonds to recycle as consumer credit.'
Patrick Bond objected 'Harvey argues the world is awash with capital'
But the lecture in question, as reported by George Monbiot in the Guardian, argues that the Iraq war is to be understood as the export of capital from an over-mature US economy.
I said 'The "profit-squeeze" was widely seen as a harbinger of economic doom'
Patrick Bond objected '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.'
Yes, that's why I put 'profit squeeze' in inverted commas, to indicate that it was the crisis as perceived, not its cause.
I said 'Diminishing returns did cause problems. Companies like Enron, Parmalat and Shell forged their accounts to disguise poor earnings. But these problems never caused the difficulties that the profit squeezes of the 1880s, 1920s or 1970s did.'
Patrick Bond says
'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.'
Well, we could talk about what is going to happen in the future, but since the collapse of capitalism has been announced with such monotonous regularity we ought to ask what happened to the Asian contagion etc etc. ('the lonely hour of the last instance never comes', Althusser said). An ideology which depends for its verification on the arrival of judgement day is not susceptible to verification or falsification.
Patrick Bond says
'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.'
Which seems like a very effective mechanism for stability, so far. Will it all end in tears? Maybe, but you have to explain why it should.
Patrick Bond says
'The other manifestations of crisis displacement - the search for relative and absolute surplus value, the spatial fix through globalisation, amplified uneven development, worsening "accumulation by dispossession" (including via superexploitation of women) - 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.'
It seems a bit strange to me to talk about a crisis that lasts for thirty years. Crisis surely implies a moment when the underlying trends manifest themselves. Your 30-year period takes in whole generations of change. Wouldn't you agree that the crisis that manifested itself in the late 1970s - great as the social turbulence it gave rise to was - was effectively contained in the 1980s. You do not seem to take account of Marx's proposition that the crisis is its own resolution. By defeating organised labour in the eighties, the capitalists laid the basis for renewed expansion from around 1993 onwards.
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Patrick Bond says '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.'
Marx explained how a speculative boom might be a reflection of crisis tendencies. But he did not - understandably - give an account of the dot.com bubble of the late 1990s, arguing instead that each individual crisis must be looked at in its own right. The underlying point stands, I think. You could have argued that the dot.com bubble was the harbinger of crisis, but the further we move from it without cataclysmic results, the less plausible that looks.
I said 'Over-accumulation' for Marx, then, is the over-accumulation of constant capital, relative to the profit-creating variable capital.'
Patrick replies 'And in turn, the overproduction of commodities beyond the capacities of the market to realise profits.'
It is true of course that in Marx's account, overaccumulation will take the form of unsold goods, but Patrick is fudging two distinctive explanations of the crisis, overaccumulation of capital, and overproduction of goods. The latter was rejected by Marx in his critique of Sismondi. All of this is academic, of course, because there is no economic crisis at present.
I said 'it was never Marx's aim to suggest there was an automatic tendency for capitalism to break down, independent of the deliberate actions of people.'
Patrick replies
'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).'
I know Grossmann's book well, and worked as copy-editor on the Pluto edition. His explanation of the counter-acting tendencies to breakdown was the point that few people understood, thinking that Marxism meant that capitalism was headed in only one direction. Today the point is clear: through a generalised acquiescence from organised labour, capitalism has succeeded in stabilising itself, largely through extensively growing, taking in far greater numbers of workers, creating a greater mass of surplus value. To put it another way, the objective and the subjective conditions are not absolutely distinct. Subjective retreat on the part of the working class is itself an objective condition, one which has given a new lease of life to capitalism.
I said: '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,'
Patrick Bond says 'Sure' conceding the point, and then goes on to complain 'but it also implies the search for absolute surplus value', which is true in the simple sense that this is the creation of value by the creation of new points of production, not by altering productive technique in existing plant.
But what Patrick means is that the expansion of the workforce implies the search (why search?) for absolute surplus value 'given the sweatshop character of those operations.' To which one should caution, it is not necessarily the case that the four million new jobs in the UK are sweatshop jobs, or that the 27 million new jobs in the USA are all sweatshop jobs, nor even that the millions of new jobs in China are all sweatshop jobs. For many of those involved, these new jobs are an advance, not a step backwards. I doubt that the women who have taken many of these jobs would relish a return to the past.
Patrick goes on to say that the expansion of the world workforce 'implies
a worsening of uneven and combined development'. But the opposite is true. The expansion of the world workforce is even greater in the developing world, like China, and has stabilised economic conditions in East Europe.
I wrote about the growth of a labour intensive service sector (implying, which appears to be the case in Britain, that Marx's "organic composition" of capital is falling, not rising).
Patrick objects
'But JH knows the problem isn't in the economy as a whole, it's in the 'value-creation' sector, namely sites where surplus value is extracted in commodity production. So much of the service sector - especially financial markets - is not about value creation, but about value *realisation*, e.g. transporting goods further to markets, or the marketing of commodities, or the maintenance of the commodity. It may be true that the production of some new dematerialised commodities - images on the page or on a DVD - is more prevalent than in Marx's time, this basic problem - distinguishing between value-producing and nonvalue producing labour - remains a central feature of crisis theory, which Heartfield should acknowledge here.'
But I think that Patrick puts to great a stress on Marx's distinction between productive and unproductive labour, which is not in any sense synonymous with the distinction between industry and services in contemporary economic statistics. By far the greater part of what is called the service sector is in Marx's sense productive, being largely a re-writing of job descriptions through contracting out such 'services' as cleaning, catering, security and other operations that make companies work. These are real, value-producing enterprises. So too do I think that it does not make sense to dismiss the expansion of the retail sector as 'unproductive', where this involves complex and time-consuming distribution, without which goods would not be goods-for-use. When the Co-operative Retail Society in the UK takes over the production and distribution of farm goods, that's not predation, it's capitalist organisation. Or to put it another way, they are not exploiting the farmers; they are exploiting the farm labourers and the checkout staff.
I said
'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.'
Patrick goes on to insist that the shortfall of investment is evidence of the excess of investment. He points to the 'optic fibre glut' in the US, but an excess of product in relation to demand is not the same thing as what Marx called an 'overaccumulation of capital' - a distinction that has evidently passed Patrick by.
Patrick says that
'JH 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.'
I agree, the material is very interesting. But it seems to me that if you have to demonstrate to people statistically that they are in the grips of an economic crisis, that somehow they cannot see, that you have a problem. Like Chicken Licken, you spend your time telling people that the sky is falling down.
Patrick objects when I say that the critics shy away from the growth that took place in the 1990s:
'No, growth would be the capacity to maintain the 1950s-60s ('Golden Age') investment levels forever. Because of overinvestment problems that emerged from the early 1970s (or late 1960s) onwards, the 'growth' that capitalism has generated has been less 'sustainable' (capable of reproducing itself) given how quickly new markets fall victim to overproduction problems.'
But this is just formalism. So what if the growth that took place in the 1990s was not as profound as the growth that took place in the 1950s-60s? (Incidentally, people living then did not experience this as a 'Golden Age', but one that was just as problematic in its own way.) It is no good telling people that the real improvement in their living conditions is not happening, or that somehow it does not meet the standards of the Golden Age. There was 'stop-go' in the sixties, too. By contrast, the last decade seems pretty stable. No doubt there are real problems in SA, too, but would you really say that things had not improved for ordinary people since, say, 1994?
Patrick does allow that
'The overcapacity [not a term I would have used] in the system as a whole is occasionally lessened, during recessions or the shutdown of geographically-specific sites of industry, and the rise of the credit bubble allows some of the commodities to be mopped up in an unsustainable consumption boom, to be sure.'
Which seems a bit mealy-mouthed to me, but lets go with it
'But moving these problems around across space or through time (credit allows you to buy today - on hopes of realising more surplus value in the future) is no substitute for a genuine resolution of the crisis conditions, and for a renewal of accumulation. The last time such conditions were in place were the 1930s-40s, when the crisis required a Great Depression and World War to wipe out the economic deadwood that had overaccumulated.'
The trouble with thinking in terms of the longue duree is that you are wising away the present. Rather than trying to force real-time events into preconceived categories, oughtn't you be trying to understand present conditions?
Patrick says that the recession of 1974-84 was not comparable in its effects to the 30s and 2WW. I would say it was probably more profound. The working class emerged from the 2WW combative, the organised labour was effectively defeated by the 1990s. After the 2WW capitalism collapsed in Eastern Europe and China. The 1980s saw the re-establishment of capitalist social relations there and in the Soviet Union as well. I can tell you that in Britain the shakeout of industry was epochal, leading to more root and branch reform than in the 1930s.
I argued that the current period was one where the old left adapted its Marxoid arguments to meet the moralism of today's anti-globalisation protestors, and, as if to prove the point Patrick Bond illustrates it very well, saying:
'The 'old left's' crisis theory never adequately dealt with the social degradations of mass capitalist culture ('personal consumption') and especially of the ecological damage associated with rampant capitalism, including excessive global warming and the looming exhaustion of fossil fuels (especially petroleum). Harvey's thesis about accumulation by dispossession, added to his geopolitics, fills some of those gaps nicely.'
But all of this is just a dog's breakfast of conflicting ideas that are only allowed to coalesce because of the lack of critical thinking in today's 'movement'.
Patrick does not even seem to notice that he is not just addressing a loophole but inverting the socialist critique of capitalism. He says that the old left 'never adequately dealt with the social degradations of mass capitalist culture ("personal consumption")'. No indeed: they left that farrago of reaction to the romantic anti-capitalists like Ruskin, Carlyle and Hitler. There concern was to prevent hardship, not create it. Patrick's green friends no doubt hate the fact that working class people have more goods at their disposal, and project their own anxieties about fossil fuel depletion onto that.
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