Carrol Cox wrote:
> But what if this is part of a permanent (until the next) change in the
> structure of capitalist economy, representing a more-or-less 'normal'
> grinding poverty for up to 20% of the population, pins & needles for
> another (say) 40%, and doing fine for the top 40.
That's pretty much what I've been saying for a long time. The anomaly was 1950-73.
> Why assume that capitalism's (projected) failure to "work" for a large
> populattion is any failure from the perspective of either the "system"
> or its favored elements?
That's not my position. In fact, part of my longstanding disagreement with Patrick Bond has been over just that. Large swathes of poverty are not a sign that the system isn't working - it's standard operating procedure.
Doug
^^^^^
CB: There's a really big swath of poverty , a really thick Lazurus Layer here in Detroit.
See Marx's absolute general law of capitalist accumulation on "swathes of poverty":
"The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus layers of the working class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here. "
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm#S4