> Doug Henwood wrote:
> > On Dec 1, 2008, at 7:24 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
> >> You lads haven't run across the underlying evil below all this
> financial froth? (Overaccumulation of capital.)
> > Patrick, you always offer that as the one-size-fits-all
> explanation of the last four decades of economic history.
>
> Doug, a 'one size fits all explanation' doesn't belong in political
> economy. What does belong in any poli-econ theorising, however, is a
> sense of where the laws of motion of the capitalist system are
> driving micro and macro economies. Laws of motion are not 'one
> size', but they are peculiar to commodity production, distribution,
> exchange and financing under capitalism. Do you have a problem with
> a deep theoretical process?
Not at all. But your theory seems to generalize from a sample of 1, the 1929-45 period of depression and war.
> > I've got several problems with it. It treats "capital" as some
> unitary, easily measurable thing, like a yard of wool or quart of
> milk, when of course it isn't.
>
> Which brand of Marxian poli econ does that? I don't know of any.
> 'Capital' is a social relation, one that generates a tendency to
> overaccumulation.
Your notion of devalorization does that implicitly, by ignoring the regional and sectoral ebb and flow, which can involve significant devalorization without showing up in the aggregate stats.
> > It includes about four or five complete U.S. business cycles,
> several of which have brought about major structural transformations.
>
> For you, it's a structural transformation; for others it's more
> intensive relative and absolute surplus extraction,
Call it what you want, but speedup, outsourcing, wage cutting, etc., are all pretty major structural changes.
> by way of a spatio-temporal fix or recourse to accumulation by
> dispossession.
Here again, another of my problems. A "spatio-temporal fix" sounds a bit like three-card monte, some sort of confidence trick. But this has been the history of capitalism for centuries - long-term growth in the aggregates with a lot of regional and sectoral volatility under the surface. If I weren't sick to death of the phrase, I'd say the "s-t f" is just another way of saying "creative destruction."
> Indeed, because Keynesian capitalism failed to transform and instead
> adopted neoliberal fixes, the crisis tendencies were never properly
> resolved during the business cycle downturns, and instead the crises
> were managed and displaced... temporarily (as I've been trying to
> persuade you for about 20 years - and this year should have been
> persuasive, comrade!)
We still don't know how this is going to turn out, do we? And what if it is a long, deep recession? You think the system will never recover and grow again?
> > Some of those have been periods of high investment (e.g., the late
> 1990s)
>
> We never agreed on whether the 'high investment' (largely in
> software that proved too faddish or relatively useless)
That's just not true. The entire system of production and distribution has been revolutionized by high tech. You may remember that I was once a skeptic on the contribution of ICT to the productivity acceleration, but I renounced my skepticism in the early 2000s. The evidence was just too strong - Gordon, Jorgenson, Stiroh, Oliner, Sichel, etc. Or ask Sam Gindin about what tech has done to the labor process in auto.
> I'm glad you're turning to the valorisation/devalorisation
> framework. But as you know, these were partial, not the kind of full-
> fledged 1929-45 devalorisation required to clear away all the
> economic deadwood and restart capital accumulation.
n=1
> > There have also been major investment booms, as in China.
>
> Yes, in addition to financial profiteering, the amplification of
> uneven development has been a major contributing force to the
> problems caused ultimately by overaccumulation.
Again, history of capitalism. Was English development a displacement of a Dutch problem? Of the U.S. a displacement of an English problem? Etc.
> Malaysia’s ambiguous capital controls.
Not socialist revolution, but a lot better than what happened to South Korea.
Doug