Mike Beggs wrote:
>
> As I remember, in Limits Harvey focused on devaluation of fixed capital
> as a resolution through crisis of overcapacity. (Similarly, financial
> busts as a devalorisation of overaccumulated financial capital.) The
> implication was that crisis was generally something quick and
> restorative, which is in keeping with Marx's definition of crisis.
>
>
Right, that was the impression; he even ends the first edn of that book
(given the context in 1982) with the idea of a very quick (though not
restorative) mode of devalorisation: nuclear war.
But capitalism found lots of new crisis-management techniques; that's why in 1989 he worked harder to see postmodernism as a spatio-temporal compression, and in 2003 in New Imperialism reintroduced the Luxemburgist problematic of capital/noncapital superexploitation ('accumulation by dispossession').
> Ben Fine and various co-authors have repeatedly made the point in
> debating Brenner that devalorisation of fixed capital happens all the
> time and makes 'persistent overcapacity' unlikely.
In part that's because we haven't had any good data sets on
overcapacity, because the *potential* to bring on idle capacity cannot
be measured by the standard National Accounts categories. Trying to get
around this in my PhD (on Zimbabwe) I dug into a deeper dataset from a
series of Census of Industrial Production questionnaires to search for
inventories, which worked as a good proxy on excess capacity in mfg
subsectors, I felt. Anyhow, such does not exist globally. I've searched
but found no one able to really do the quant work on overaccumulation
either in terms of productive overcapacity or the other manifestations.
It's a long slog ahead to do this right, and unfortunately lots of
people, including the late great Andrew Glyn, feigned at the
overaccumulation data but didn't measure it convincingly. However, if
you are characterising Ben properly (and I'm not sure he'd be so
simple), how do you explain the vast increases in productive capacity in
the auto sector, for instance, notwithstanding periodic devaluations of
specific plants?
> In Capital and Class
> [some issue in 1999] they point out that mergers and acquisitions are
> often intended to rationalise industries by shutting down
> underperforming overcapacity.
But what does 'shutting down' mean? (Please send me that steel study if
you can as I don't have access to the jnl.) Generally, industrial
plant/equipment/factory can be brought back online after mothballing
fairly quickly these days (don't you love the movie The Take?).
Sometimes capitalism needs a *resolution* of overcapacity, and the last
time - 1929-45 - wasn't so pretty.
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