>Marv, you seem to be missing the 800-pound gorilla in the room -
>profitability.
You hear that a lot, but it's not so obvious as an 800-pound gorilla:
http://www.zcommunications.org/capitalist-crisis-radical-renewal-by-leo-panitch
"when you actually look at the numbers, what you do see is that profits have actually recovered from the lows that they were. They're not at the peak they were at in the 1960s, but that was a unique period."
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Sasha Lilley: Various Marxist critics have argued that the financialization of the economy is capital’s means of addressing the underlying stagnation of the “real economy,” of industry in decline. The argument goes that the current crisis is part of a long downturn starting in the 1970s and capitalism’s ill-health has been masked by a shift into profit-making through all sorts of incomprehensible derivatives and forms of speculation. You three see things quite differently. How so?
Sam Gindin: To elaborate a little more on what Leo was saying: part of the role of financeonce you see it in terms of capitalismis to discipline and restructure the so-called real economy. It's been fundamental to that, imposing discipline on every factory to be more competitive or finance will go somewhere else, to reallocate capital across several sectors, venture capital, but much more generally. So finance has been fundamental to that.
The other way that finance has been absolutely crucial too, is to understanding capitalism in terms of its imperial dimension. It's been fundamental to capitalism actually penetrating other countries, imposing certain conditions if they want the finance, putting the United States in a position where the American state is responsible for managing capitalism more generally; and for integrating the working classin addition to them using credit in the macro sense that it keeps the economy goingthe involvement of workers in the circuits of capitalism in terms of housing and pensions and their assets rising. It’s also been a socialization of workers.
Now in terms of specifically the question of decline, if you leave aside looking at specific numbers for a second and just think about what's happened over the last quarter of a century, it actually looks like one of the most dynamic periods from a capitalist perspectivenot from a worker perspective, but from a capitalist perspective. It's a period in which you've penetrated China. You've penetrated the former Soviet Union. You're now penetrating the enormous potential of the Indian market. You've seen a powerful commodification of things that used to be seen as part the Commons. Part of what government provides has been privatized as sources of accumulation. You've seen very radical breakthroughs in technology over this period in terms of that kind of dynamism.
And when you actually look at the numbers, what you do see is that profits have actually recovered from the lows that they were. They're not at the peak they were at in the 1960s, but that was a unique period. And the restructuring of the economy has been very dramatic across sectors. If you're looking at the American economy, it has restructured geographically. It has restructured in terms of what sectors are dominant right now. The importance of business services has become a very fundamental part of the economy, especially in terms of the American global role. High tech in the U.S. has grown dramatically. The U.S. has been importing a lot but it has also been exporting a lot.
So I don't think there's been a lot of credibility to the argument of the American economy having declined. The real problem we have is that all this restructuring has gone on and workers have basically been pretty passive victims. They've accepted this. They haven't in any way been acting as a barrier in terms of putting other social goals or social values on the agenda. And that's allowed capitalismAmerican capitalism in particularto restructure at will. And it's done really well in terms of accumulation.
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