Patrick, replying to my assertion that capitalism had stabilised between 1994 and 2007, says
"the 1990s and first half of the 2000s saw progressively lower per capita growth rates, so you can chop/change and find 1994-2007 as a slightly higher period but it's a strange slice because you've got two upstages and just one recession, so I've never heard of this kind of dating aside from people who like to torture stats until they confess and I'm *sure* that doesn't include you."
Well, look, I said stabilised, not taken off. Growth is growth. You say you never heard any such dating, but I was only repeating what the Office of National Statistics said (http://www.hbosplc.com/media/pressreleases/articles/halifax/2004-12-23-Ukeconomyg.asp?section=Halifax) Was the ONS torturing the statistics? No. You can argue with the definitions of GDP all you like, but it is a generally accepted measure, if not a Marxist category.
Further, Patrick writes
"the whole point of the theories Marx and Harvey (and others) developed about countervailing forces is that you *can* have crisis tendencies but there are mitigating factors that end up pushing and pulling the overaccumulated capital here and there, so that the crisis is displaced through space and time, and into a new version of primitive accumulation."
I don't often agree with Marvin, but I think he called rightly you out on this. Marx's chapter on countervailing tendencies is trying to explain why capitalism is not in a state of perennial crisis (as was implied by Sisimondi's theory). Harvey's revision of Marx's theory is pretty much a dismantling of it.
When Marx talked about crises, he had in mind real world events, that were evident to all, not hidden laws at work under the surface of society. Crisis for him was that point when the law of accumulation's fundamental contradictions erupted. If crisis becomes something that's existence needs to be demonstrated by analysis then it isn't crisis. It would be better to say that the law of accumulation was asserting itself throughout - but even here, as I argue, that is not quite what is happening.
Patrick argues with the fact that the capitalist system has vastly expanded its workforce world wide, but other than saying that these jobs are not well paid (which is true) and that there has been a decline in Chinese manufacturing workforce (which is just daft) he does not have any rebuttal at all.
I said that
> the capitalists stabilised their system after 1989 with the
> expansion into the Stalinist territories and the defeat of the organised
> working class.
And, talking in some weird code, Patrick replies
"That's one theory of the way the partial devalorisation of overaccumulated capital plays out . 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."
But that does not make sense at all. When you say that there has not been a new round of accumulation you mean what, exactly? That factories are empty, lying idle, that output has ground to a halt? This is not the world the rest of us are living in. If by 'devalorisation' you mean that some capital investments went bust - that is true, but the way that the capitalists resolved the crisis was by defeating the working class (and nationalist and Stalinist movements).
Patrick:
"I'd still look at 1990s-2000s growth as anaemic."
And I would agree with you, especially in the West, but anemic growth is most definitely not 'crisis'.
Patrick, objecting to my point that the British economy did not show signs of a rising organic composition of capital, but a falling one, as living labour displaced machinery in the shift to service sector employment.
"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? "
It is a misreading of Marx (and Grossmann) and the economy for that matter to assume that 'service sector' is coeval with 'unproductive'.