[lbo-talk] Patrick Bond responds to voices in his head

Patrick Bond pbond at mail.ngo.za
Fri Jan 18 07:26:54 PST 2008


James Heartfield wrote:
> The readers of LBO are no less
> empathetic to Chinese labor than South African professors, and quite capable
> of surfing Monthly Review - indeed among its target audience.
>

Yeah, I know, I should have said "sp!ked" readers, who are fed pro-consumerist propaganda non-stop, comrade. :-)


> Who said that Chinese labor practices were 'something to be proud of',
> exactly? When did the question of whether or not capital was, in Marx's
> definition, overaccumulated slip into whether contracting labor was graceful
> or not?
>

I dunno, our conversations do wander. That's the trouble with email back-and-forth bitchiness. If we had a nice skype connection going here we could hone in on something and follow the logic through to a conclusion without jumping down the page to the next insult. By the way, we are doing regular skypecast seminars now (just had one yesterday on 'water as a right' based on the famous Joburg constitutional court case last month, with participants from NZ to Colombia - and next week's will be on Kenya and Zim politics, plus WSF Day) at http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs


> What was at question was whether the sub-prime crisis was an expression of
> overaccumulation. For this to be the case one would expect investment in
> constant capital (machinery, plant) to displace investment in variable
> capital (wages). I pointed out that in the developed world, on the contrary,
> there was more expansion in employment than in business investment.

I should have said that the evidence of reinvestment rates in *value-producing* plant and equipment have, as I recall (don't have data at hand) been rather weak in the last quarter century compared with the one before that. (Doug will say the Golden Age was special, but never mind.) That means the rising service and especially FIRE (financial insurance real estate) sector will indeed have many more jobs being created to push around all that paper. And that is perfectly consistent with the Marx-Grossman-Harvey story. Agreed?


> Patrick
> said ok, but in China, there was overaccumulation. Now we have the
> statistics to say, on the contrary that private investment their is
> 'job-rich', too.
>

James, what's important and evident is that the vast new Chinese mfg output is contributing to global overaccumulation (e.g. in autos at quite a frightening rate), the way the other E.Asian increases in mfg output did during the 1990s. And the tensions generated in that process, country by country, and sector by sector, are becoming rather serious. What's the problem? (It seems the Chinese government recognises this, at least, and is embarking upon a vast Keynesian investment project now, in the search for a bit more balance...)


> So we have the sleight of hand that Patrick accuses people of hymning
> Chinese growth. But that is an argument he is having in his own head, not
> what anyone else was saying.
>

Ok no more singing in my head then. I don't know where we go from here comrade, but lead on.



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