On Feb 23, 2009, at 2:34 PM, Patrick Bond wrote:
> SA wrote:
> > in what way is the current crisis connected with the alleged
> overcapacity problem? It isn't.
>
> Sure it is, SA. The effective demand problem is only one piece. The
> other is rising organic composition of capital (Robert Brenner
> unfortunately does not foreground this) and declining rates of
> profit in value-producing activities, from the early 1970s onwards.
> And hence from the early 1980s, a variety of spatio-temporal
> displacements of overaccumluation are invoked. David Harvey's work
> sets this out as well as anyone's.
>
> Here's a little version of the riff: http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/OPE/archive/0412/0039.html
Where we read:
To start with diagnoses of the situation, four critical schools of thought are worth citing because they have somewhat different - and often competing - ideas about what ails US and global capitalism:
1) Overly competitive corporations, which drive down the rate of profit;
2) Overconfidence within financial markets, which today act more like a casino than savings/investment mechanism;
3) Overproduction of commodities, as a persistent reflection of inadequate consumer buying power; and
4) Overaccumulation of capital more generally, a problem which cannot be displaced forever, but which one day must face more severe devaluation.
We're certainly living through a devaluation, though there have been plenty of devaluations of manufacturing capital in the U.S. over the last 30 years.
In any case, the rate of profit *rose* from 1982 through 1997, despite the best attempts of Marxists to adjust that rise away. And "overproduction of commodities" despite the highest consumption share of GDP in U.S. history? And overaccumulation of capital despite the lowest rate of investment of the last 5 expansions?
Doug