On Dec 18, 2009, at 2:14 PM, Alan Rudy wrote:
> It is quite likely I'm reading Harvey so that he says what I want
> him to
> say, that what he says confirms my sense of things. I read all of
> Harvey's
> neoliberalism stuff as a variation on a theme by the Condition of
> Postmodernity argument that treating post-Fordism as if it didn't
> have maybe
> even a majority of Fordist and/or pre-Fordist production in it, or
> post-modernity as if there weren't a condition built on an overweaning
> modernism... in short, neoliberalism represents neo-liberalism - an
> romantic
> and ideological effort by capital to return to a bygone era... to
> desocialize, dedemocratize and reallocate surplus value.
Sure, but an undoing of gains of the working class isn't the same as the primary appropriation. E.g., a privatization of a once-public firm (even if it was an instance of lemon socialism) is different from privatizing the commons. Because the once-public firm was before that private (I recall Ernest Mandel calling these "reprivatizations").
> The terrain of acquisitions and mergers - an integral
> part of business and investment under neoliberalism has been
> explicitly
> about the liquidization of fixed capital stocks. These liquid
> assets are
> then reinvested in derivatives, hedge funds and beyond.
Except that according to the Fed's flow of funds stats, the value of the tangible capital stock of U.S. nonfinancial firms topped out at 132% of GDP in 1982. The ratio fell from a high of 117% in 1950 to 97% in 1966 (also the peak year for profitability, using the tangible capital stock as the denominator - and the year of the first post-WW2 credit crunch). It rose through the 1970s to the 1982 peak - then fell. The 1980s wave of takeovers was about reducing the tangible capital stock - theorists like Michael Jensen were quite clear on this. But the decline reversed in 1996, as the dot.com mania was taking off and the productivity acceleration got underway. It then began to rise through 2007, the cyclical peak, hitting 140% of GDP. It's now around 116%.
There's a lot of magic to estimating the value of the capital stock, I know, but this story needs some empirical backing if it's to be convincing, despite its theoretical appeal. I know that a lot of Marxists find bourgeois stats on capital and profits to be unreliable because they don't separate the productive from the unproductive, but I get very suspicious of adjustments that end up proving what the authors want to prove.
Doug