>PB: No, I think you're right, there, if you mean the transition to the epoch
>of socialism. But I also think capitalist history moves forward via crises.
>That's what's happening now in many places, and in SA in 1994, and in
>E.Europe in 1990, and in many other parts of the world post-1975 - Southern
>Europe, the Southern Cone, East Asia, even parts of Africa - where even
>without an insurgent working-class democratic movement, really interesting
>opportunities emerged during the course of particular crises. The crises
>weakened the rulers, and opened space for the next round of post-repression
>social struggles.
And the ANC regime in SA is thoroughly orthodox, as are the regimes of EE. What happened to this great opening?
>PB: The defeat of labour was one important reason for a temporary uptick in
>profits, but other deep-seated contradictions continue appearing, especially
>in the financial circuitry and ecosystems.
Sometimes folks like you take a problem, even a serious problem, to be a crisis.
I don't doubt the severity of ecological stresses, but I can't shake the suspicion that a lot of crisis-philes, from the admirable (O'Connor) to the risible (Proyect) have shifted their attention from the economic to the natural realms. Isn't there always the chance we'll just muddle through?
>PB: Agreed, one doesn't want to be Chicken Little, and of course the easy
>answer to the Asian crisis partial displacement (not full resolution), to be
>found in works by Burkett, Hart-Landsberg, Li, Bello and Greenfield, is that
>ruling class coalitions shifted, US capital cleaned up by grabbing
>devalorised capital, and the currencies crashed so far that their goods
>became competitive again, which just contributed more pressure to rising
>global gluts in many sectors.
Here's an instance of exaggerating a serious problem - the SE Asia panic - into a major crisis. Most of the Asian economies have recovered from the 1998 mess. As for the gluts, surely you've heard that Chinese demand is creating shortages and price spikes in crucial commodities.
>PB: No, the contradictions appeared, and power relations shifted - hence
>what we call neoliberalism emerged, to specifically boost
>financial/commercial circuit returns - and the broader problem of
>overaccumulation continued, with various symptoms of amplified
>combined/uneven development.
I wish you'd explain how China and India, which between them account for over a third of the world's population, fit into this.
>PB: That's the class-strugglist conception of crisis. The overaccumulation
>conception follows the approach articulated by Robert Cox, in my view. Here'
>s Cox from his brilliant Production, Power and World Order (1987): 'the
>economy must undergo some structural change in order to emerge from a
>crisis; in a cyclical downturn, the same structure contains the seeds of its
>own revival'. We've had lots of pseudo-structural changes, but the 'revival'
>isn't convincing. A structural change so as to kickstart a new round of
>accumulation - e.g. the post-war Golden Age - invariably involves massive
>generalised devalorisation.
Why is the Golden Age the standard? What if it was an anomaly, and the real norm is more like an average of history less the 1950-73 period?
>PB: Not at all. Each bail-out of the system (in this case Greenspan's
>ultraloose monetary policy) simply displaces the contradictions elsewhere.
>If not managed well, they have the propensity to bubble out in sometimes
>cataclysmic ways. But by not resolving the problems - only displacing them -
>the broader crisis conditions continue to build.
You've got to admit that the state bailout engineers have done a pretty good job of it. Sometimes you sound like an Austrian, skeptical that state intervention can solve anything.
>PB: A little breathing space of low-intensity production-based class
>struggle (hence the increasingly important role of 'new social movements' in
>anti-capitalism), that's all.
What's the positive program of anti-capitalism anyway?
>PB: I meant, it's through the mcdonaldisation of jobs that Doug's new book
>describes so well, characterised by intensified exploitation, speed-up
>techniques and other factors associated with lower wages/perks for most US
>workers.
Sucks for the proletariat, but so far it's working.
>PB: Yeah, I've read the very mixed-up literature on this last point, and
>agree that there are some maquilla workers who are better off than they were
>under Mexican patriarchy. But that's why we need to think about the whole
>range of activities associated with these processes, because so much of
>contemporary capitalism is about the commodification of public/merit goods
>and the commons, the breakdown of the division of labour into more complex
>units, and so on. So feminisation of poverty, rising migrant labour
>(including a greater need for women's household reproduction without the
>immediate income source), and so many other features of the uneven gendered
>development of capitalism mean that women are worse off, in general, even if
>a few break out of pure feudal-patriarchy into capitalist-patriarchy.
A few? For a lot of women workers in LA and Asia, factory work provides a bit of independence from patriarchy. As forms of domination, class hierarchies aren't identical to gender hierarchies. The point isn't just empirically important - it's crucial if you're doing union or political organizing. "You could do better than this" is a lot different from "let me deliver you from your suffering" if the targets of the slogan don't feel like they're suffering exactly.
>PB: I don't have all my data at hand, James, but surely you saw the reports
>last year about China losing manufacturing jobs - mainly in state firms -
>due to the problem of global gluts coming home to roost? And here we're
>talking tens of millions of jobs. As for Eastern Europe, after losing half
>the GDP, of course they've got to bounce back at some point. But read
>Kagarlitsky if you think it's 'stable.'
I love Boris, but he's the ultimate excitable guy. Every twitch is the overture to cataclysm for him.
>(Hey, if you're in London this weekend, how about a beer at ULU pub after
>the Inst of Commonwealth Studies SA conference plenary speech by Colin Bundy
>on Friday?)
I can highly recommend James as a drinking companion.
Doug