> Just
> think of the expansion of the capitalistically-employed global workforce
> between 1990 and 2005.
>
>
* The intensity of uneven/combined development is naturally bound to
bring some parts of the world economy into the fold, but don't get so
enthusiastic about proletarianisation when you consider how many net
jobs are to be found in Chinese manufacturing (Marty H-L can give us
latest stats but they're really weak or even negative as I recall thanks
to all the SOEs downsizing or closing). And add to that a kind of new
subproletarianisation that is the characteristic new mode of casualised
worker in so many sites, and you won't call that a healthy prospering
capitalist economy delivering jobs to grateful middle-class British
workers, eh.
> 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.
That's one theory of the way the partial devalorisation of
overaccumulated capital plays out (I trust Simon Clarke on such
arguments). It doesn't mean that by wiping out the FSU's standard of
living, as well as Africa's and large chunks of Latin America and parts
of Asia, that enough economic deadwood has been swept away to foster the
conditions for a new round of accumulation. And you could also add the
rise of IT sectors as the potential new factor (as does Sam Gindin), but
I'd still look at 1990s-2000s growth as anaemic.
> 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)
Which means looking at the underlying laws of motion of the system: the tendency to overaccumulate, and the need to thoroughly devalue esp. fictitious capitals that have got out of whack with underlying surplus value potentials... and the huge rise of global credit markets since the 1970s simply hasn't allowed that kind of crisis *resolution* to happen, you'd have to agree now that the credit system stands so exposed.
> 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.
>
>
You're looking at stats that include labour productivity that is
technically not associated with surplus value production, so it's not so
relevant to what Marx understood as the laws of motion, right? For
goodness sake, James, it wuz you whodunnit in 1992: given us Grossman's
translation so we can get back to these sorts of questions. What
happened over these 15 years to you and the RCP lot? (Sorry, don't answer.)
> 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.
>
No, perhaps internal combined/uneven development in a most extreme way. See David Whitehouse for analysis of how the Chinese labour force is being superexploited in a manner similar to apartheid (his paper is somewhere up on our website: http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs), and anything by Minqi Li, Marty Hart-Landsberg, Paul Burkett, etc. And we can talk about the environment, of course, too. On India, isn't the main story there in the service sector, not manufactured output? See stuff by Jayati Ghosh, P.Sainath, Vivek Chibber, etc. Sorry, am dashing otherwise could dig up much better rebuttals. But even if some sites are rising with new investment, the issue is the system as a whole, and the way uneven/combined development amplify these days so as to achieve partial devaluations - to the extent possible. Even Citi's loss of $20 b on subprime is explicable as a process of partial loss and partial displacement, with the real devalorisation occuring to the African American working class, it seems (from afar).