[lbo-talk] Krugman

[Rakesh Bhandari]

If I have read him correctly, Jha would point to perverse 
de-industrialization, meaning relocation of low productivity sectors 
of US industry abroad without commensurate growth in service sector 
and advanced mfg jobs. That is, measured productivity growth is 
largely though not entirely due to job or sector elimination and 
speed up and shaved over time. But such maneuvers do not open 
outlets for new real investment (including the continuing export of 
productive capital). This motivates  the attempt to secure such 
outlets through aggression with the attendant scrapping of the 
Westphalian rules for intervention; the need to secure investment 
outlets has become the greatest threat to world peace today. Again, 
Marxism is not stagnationist. Keynesianism including in its Marxist 
forms is.
R 

On Dec 18, 2007, at 4:11 PM, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:


>  In Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, War and Chaos Prem
>  Shankar Jha talks today of a scissors movement of liquid capital
>  accumulation and investment opportunities. "As a gale of creative
>  destruction sets in, opportunities for the investment of liquid
>  capital in new fixed capital equipment rises rapidly As the new
>  equipment replaces the old, the rate of profit rises and increases
>  the rate of capital accumulation. But each replacement of the older
>  generation of equipment, and older management practices with the new,
>  circumscribes the opportunities for further rapid increases in
>  productivity. The rate of profit on future investments in fixed
>  capital therefore begins to fall just as the rate of profit on
>  existing capital reaches a peak. This creates an inexorable pressure
>  for the mounting stocks of profit on past investment, ie. of liquid
>  capital, to find new investment opportunities. That is when
>  capitalism assumes it hegemonistic form and begins to reorganize
>  large parts of the world." Jha, p. xix

I'm rushing out the door, so I can't look this up, but when was this 
written? How would it account for the 1995-2005 U.S. productivity 
acceleration?

Doug