[lbo-talk] Subprime crisis - overaccumulation?

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Tue Jan 15 01:37:41 PST 2008


Patrick Bond writes:

" There was not a 'crisis' in that sense from the 1940s-60s, but by the late 1960s systemic overaccumulation and crisis displacement processes began to be evident"

This strikes me as a misapplication of Marx's crisis theory. A crisis that has been running from 1969-2008 can't really be called a crisis - especially not when it includes a prolonged period of (modest) growth 1994-2007. Just think of the expansion of the capitalistically-employed global workforce between 1990 and 2005.

If you were to apply Marx's crisis theory, would you not be more tempted to say that the capitalists stabilised their system after 1989 with the expansion into the Stalinist territories and the defeat of the organised working class. The regime established since then - low wage-, extensive-, eastern-driven-, credit-fuelled-, job-rich growth, might well have run its course in the current credit crunch. But that is not the same thing as saying that we have been in crisis since the late sixties.

Also it is incumbent on us to explain the current crisis in its own terms (as Marx says somewhere) not to impose a schema upon it. One of the things that stands out is that this current credit crunch was not preceded by what Marxists would call a rising organic composition of capital. Indeed here in Britain, according to the DTI, it is the opposite: productivity actually fell as labour-intensive service sector jobs displaced capital intensive manufacturing ones. And that is what you would expect of a low-wage economy, that the incentive to displace labour by technology was dampened.

Nor, I think, would you describe China's growth, or India's as a displacement of living labour by machinery, but rather a great expansion of greenfield factories, i.e. extensive, not intensive growth.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list