> Michael Smith wrote:
>
>> ...As the Twenties, then the Thirties, so now. Stay tuned: will 1939
>> recur, too?
>>
>
> How else does devalorization of overaccumulated capital on the scale now
> required occur? Sure, the financial capital gets burned up (is it now over
> $25 trillion?), but the massive gluts in the real sector still need to be
> brought down to the point a new round of accumulation can get going.
>
> Last time, yes, 1939-45 was a necessary way of clearing away all the
> economic deadwood, from London to Dusseldorf to Tokyo.
>
> Nukes or not, Dennis, it's times like these that serious geopolitical games
> get underway and internecine tensions between capitalists and their states
> become sharper.
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
Is this not a little reductionist though? Today the potential for conflict among the major powers is minimal. At other times in history when it did occur the dominoes were already in place. And then, of course, you could point to those 19th century crises which led to no serious geopolitical turmoil due to the politics of the day.
Accumulated goods don't push war; but accumulated labour-surplus does push internal discontent. Seeing the internal political structures of most Western (and I stress: "Western") countries the political classes and, thus, the masses will prove unable to articulate this discontent in a coherent fashion - indeed, there's been a few posts on here alluding to this in the past few weeks - so will the immediate result not likely be chaos? On a more positive note this may prove a good time to organise, but the immediate result will probably be mass-confusion and frustration.