On Nov 26, 2007, at 9:02 PM, joanna wrote:
> 1. Capitalism so far has always been partial, it depends (someone
> famous
> said this, Gramsci) and the continued existence of non-capitalist
> modes
> on its perifery from which it draws the content it claims not to need.
> When that periphery is absorbed, then indeed the profit rate will
> go to
> zero.
That was Rosa Luxemburg's line. I like what Solidarity has to say about that:
<http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/255>
> For all these achievements, there were real limits to these
> theories — limits which become especially disenabling today. To
> begin with, the analyses of capital accumulation they advanced had
> considerable flaws. Rosa Luxemburg, for instance, held that
> imperialism was based on the search for new markets outside the
> capitalist world.
>
> Without new external markets for goods, she maintained, capitalism
> would collapse due to chronic overproduction. Not only is there
> very little evidence that newly colonized territories constituted
> important export markets — how could they, given the poverty of the
> colonized? — but Luxemburg failed to grasp capitalism’s capacity
> for intensive, as well as extensive, growth.
>
> Put simply, capitalism regularly creates new markets for both
> consumer and capital goods inside the so-called “developed world” —
> whether for fast food or computers. While it is preferable to
> locate markets for both intensive and extensive growth, the
> disappearance of the latter would not spell the death of capitalism.
> 2. There is the possibility that a new periphery can always be created
> by means of war or other forms of disaster.
That's like Naomi Klein's argument, but really - how big are these in economic terms? New Orleans was a horror, but it was an economic blip.
Doug