> As always, a thoughtful analysis by David Laibman, editor of Science & Society:
>
> http://urpe.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/the-onset-of-great-depression-ii/
>
Seriously?
I knew Laibman slightly when I was taking classes at CUNY. Seems like a likable and smart guy. But really - he's gone off the rails here:
> The history of the latter decades of the 20th century, until the
> present, is one of the gradual undoing of this working-class position
> of strength and reversion of the balance of class forces to its more
> normal state: a passive, apolitical working class and a healthily
> (from the capitalist standpoint) valorized labor-power commodity. The
> decline in trade union membership in the United States is a factual
> symbol of this history.
>
> And standing in glaring contradiction to it is the emergence in the
> USA of widespread working-class home ownership after World War II.
> Reflecting the social advance of the working class, home ownership was
> also central to the subsequent ideological derailment, as was
> “consumerism,” the suburban life style, and much else. But the
> accumulation of personal wealth in the form of real estate was also a
> growing threat to the classical proletarian condition, and therefore
> an obstacle to the progressive re-emergence of unfettered capitalist
> class rule. What was needed — again, from the standpoint of capital —
> was nothing less than a new re-dispossession of workers on a large
> scale. From this standpoint, the crisis — for capital — is the
> advanced social and political position of the working class that
> emerged following the mobilizations related to the world wars, the
> Depression, the victory over fascism — and the continued existence,
> and threat, of the Soviet Union. The resolution of the crisis is
> re-proletarianization, much more advanced in the USA than in, say,
> Western Europe.
...
> Now the question — how much debt leverage is possible? — seems
> unanswerable, unless we bring in the balance of forces cycle (the one
> that, as noted, many Marxists have trouble with). Why, for example,
> when the mortgage market showed signs of trouble last year, was a new
> securitization not possible? Tension in this market has been on the
> rise for years, after all. The answer may well lie along these lines:
> Repackaging and underwriting of the bad loans was possible, in
> principle; it would simply have required the sort of lofty thinking
> and long time horizon that goes against the grain of capital — like
> chimpanzees standing erect on two legs for short periods — but can be
> accomplished by them through use of the state apparatus. What
> happened, however, is that powerful ruling circles in banking and
> finance (and politics) concluded that the housing crisis should not be
> further postponed; that it was now both necessary and politically
> possible. The crisis of homelessness in the U. S. working class is
> precisely the assertion of a central capitalist imperative:
> reproduction of the proletarian status of workers ultimately requires
> their propertylessness (2). This need not be thought of as a simple
> conspiracy: it is rather that the balance of forces have evolved, in
> what from our standpoint is an unfavorable direction, to a point at
> which powerful players in the financial markets, and in government,
> now think the consequences of saving low-income home ownership are
> worse than the consequences of letting that ownership slide. This may
> appear as nothing other than good financial decision making, but it
> ultimately results from a shifting world balance of class forces, in
> which the demise of the Soviet Union, while certainly not the only
> factor, was nevertheless a crucial one.
Who knew - that the Ownership Society was actually a socialist scheme for the decommodification of labor!
SA