On Dec 19, 2008, at 4:21 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
> What's the difference between comrade Doug's line and that of a
> garden-variety Keynesian, or even eclectic-Bernankian? Isn't an
> opportunity like writing for the LA Times appropriate for pushing
> the envelope on acceptable discourse a bit further leftward?
> Contrast with the more explicitly Marxist approach, appropriately
> sceptical, from Whitney (below).
>
> So when Doug says, "It's not just critics who say the Fed is
> printing money to fix the economy. That's what it's doing, and I
> don't see what's wrong with it." How about saying, as a Marxist,
> fiddling on the margins with monetarist pump-priming won't work, as
> Japan showed from 1990 onwards, due to systemic overaccumulation.
> It's not just a loss of animal spirits for extending credit; what is
> at stake is widescale overproduction and overcapacity, and Fed
> maneuvres just aren't going to address that fundamental
> contradiction. The resolution of that overaccumulation - as distinct
> from its displacement - only comes through much more fundamental
> restructuring (WWII last time) and rejigging of social relations.
> That's where the fight gets interesting, and that's where our
> current failure, on the left, to make a dent in the financial crisis
> displacement has to be rapidly overcome... starting with more robust
> analysis that we get from Doug in the LA Times, I'm afraid.
Patrick, if I were given to nattering on about overaccumulation, the LA Times would never have asked me to do this, and if by some weird chance they had, no one would read it. You have to think about audience.
You may have noticed that there's no political movement pushing for anything beyond a large stimulus program. You may call that "garden- variety Keynesian," but when was the last time you saw a spending package that's very likely to be adopted approaching $1 trillion? When we're facing a possible economic meltdown, you have to defend aggressive fiscal and monetary policies against right-wing critiques. Did you see the questions I was told to address, and the political affiliations of my interlocutor? I don't set the terms of debate - that's hegemony for you.
Still, all this state intervention is changing the political terrain. Note that the Republic Doors & Windows workers used the aid to BoA as part of their argument. We're going to see more of it this in the future.
Re: Japan. We should be so lucky. After a speculative mania of world historic proportions led to a bust of equally impressive magnitude, Japan suffered not a depression, but a decade of stagnation. The unemployment rate, as computed by the BLS to conform to U.S. definitions, maxed out at 5.4% in 2002. The 1992-2007 average was 4.0%. Over that same period, the U.S. jobless rate averaged 5.3%, and hit a high of 7.7% in 1992. Our latest reading is 6.7%. According to the OECD, Japan had a poverty rate of 15.3% in the late 1990s (in a bust), vs. 17.0% in the U.S. (in a boom). Oh, and its auto industry isn't on the verge of collapse. Japan at the depths of its long bust was in better shape than is the U.S. in the early acts of its bust. For an economy allegedly suffering from a serious case of overaccumulation, Japan has been doing not half bad.
Finally, wait til you see my concluding paragraph of today's installment.
Doug