c b wrote:
> CB: Hello, Patrick. Since you are going to be at Berkeley, perhaps you will visit us in Detroit again sometime soon. Also perhaps, you would want to substitute the word "immiseration" for "crisis" in this discussion. The definition of "crisis" would tend to refer to something that is periodic.
Hi Charles, I have just spent a few days relocating, so sorry for the delayed reaction. Yes, the whole point of the dispute is that there's a periodic tendency for capital to overaccumulate, and by my defnition of crisis (following from Robert Cox), that means capitalism has to do something external to its 'laws of motion': devalorize. That's what at stake in this debate: whether capitalism has these terrible spells of diseqilibrium, or whether business-as-usual continues in an uninterrupted way.
And yes, there's also a tendency to uneven and combined development, of which one feature is immiseration, and yes, that's a secular trend. But at stake here is how to think about episodic crises, which the other comrades are wont to deny.
And yes, hope to see you in Detroit, we have more to learn from crisis and failed displacement, e.g. in the built environment, than most anywhere in the US.
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dredmond at efn.org wrote:
> On Thu, September 2, 2010 11:32 pm, Patrick Bond wrote:
>
>
>> For the rest of living elsewhere, the crisis has been coming in much
>> deeper and longer waves (the first article below has a list of extreme
>> devaluations).
>>
>
> Here's the data, in market exchange rates, not purchasing power parities,
> for GDP
Dennis, two quick replies. First, the crucial factor in overaccumulation is a stagnation process once overproduction sets in, followed by financial bubbling. Do you not agree that the decline in the rate of real world GDP growth from the 1960s (3.6% per capita GDP increase per annum) to the 1970s (2.1%) to the 1980s (1.3%) to the 1990s (1.1%) to the 2000s (also around 1.1%) would be of interest?
And second, I didn't make my point sufficiently strongly, but GDP is a terrible way to measure how capital accumulates and disaccumulates, as so much is left out (the rudimentary graph I meant to point you to in the prior post is normally here: http://www.rprogress.org/sustainability_indicators/genuine_progress_indicator.htm )
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James Heartfield wrote:
> Patrick chides Doug for failing to 'notice a crisis was coming down on your head within weeks' but then adds that in 'the last 20 years, crisis has been rather persistent'.
>
Yes. That's one reason we expect much better performance from Doug, and you too, James. Here's what Krugman says today, and it applies to you guys: "I had hoped that we would do better this time. But it turns out that politicians and economists alike have spent decades unlearning the lessons of the 1930s, and are determined to repeat all the old mistakes."
> But if it was already there, then it would not be 'coming down on your head' it would be here.
I know! Frustrating!
> It is the ABC not of Marxism, but of the English language, that (as Marx writes in TSV) 'there are no permanent crises'.
Of course not. Capital recovers from its long overaccumulation problems, but only through massive devalorization (that's why Krugman's Keynesianism is so weak today, for he can't even recognise the [un]creative destruction that laid the basis for post-War accumulation; he thinks it's all due to deficit spending).
> Crisis means eruptive event, by definition, a crisis cannot be prolonged.
It can be displaced; and Marx talked lots about the countervailing tendencies to the falling rate of profit, such as increased turnover time and the search for relative and absolute surplus value. What we know much more about, partly thanks to your group's translation of Grossman two decades ago, is financial bubbling, and how that provides the temporal fix needed to prolong - but not resolve - the crisis.
> If it is the ordinary state of affairs, then it is not a crisis.
>
The 'ordinary' state of affairs for capitalism, it's internal law of motion, is accumulation. I'm arguing that this process started having very substantial problems. The reproduction of the system wasn't occurring according to its internal drive to accumulate. When that happens, unless displacement prolongs the problems, the only solution to provide that corrective, is something outside capitalism's inner laws of motion: devalorization.
> And surely Patrick is being pulling his punches. Isn't his theory that it is all the same 'crisis'
The word 'same' means that crisis displacement - the shifting, stalling and stealing (i.e., spatial fix, temporal fix and accumulation by dispossession - has prolonged world capitalism's problems without providing a resolution, that's all.
> that has been going on since 1970, which would mean that we have been in crisis for the last forty years - four fifths of my life, and I guess the entirety of many people reading the LBO list.
>
For many people /not /reading the LBO list in Africa, yes, that's true. For many in privileged parts of the world, from where the crisis was displaced, they may not have noticed - or cared about - crisis being transferred to, say, the Third World.
> Patrick has turned Marx's theory of accumulation on its head. What for Marx was a theory of capitalist expansion trhough exploitation, interrupted by crises, has become a theory of permanent crisis.
Not permanent, just displaced for a long time, with most of the partial devalorizations (that 50% crash in global equity markets in six months from October 2008, for instance) not doing a sufficiently powerful job of restoring the conditions for a new round of accumulation. By the way, there's a whole school of thought - World Systems - based on the long-wave theory, and they've identified at least four global capitalist cycles of this nature.
> That's not Marx, it is Sisimondi, or Malthus.
>
Or Wallerstein?
> And who is this addressed to, exactly? Is it meant to convince the workers to wake up and recognise the fact that they are not living in dull times, but in the midst of a great social crisis?
Yes! That their crisis is a more generalised situation.
> If they don't think that they are living in such a state, then there is no such state, since a crisis could not be an event that was not experienced as such.
>
No, it allows us to talk about problems such as the Third World debt crisis as being about their privilege in displacing costs of overaccumulated finance, and then to help go through why that creates a boomerang effect (Susan George's phrase) because the displacement of that contradiction in turn generates another.
> Is it addressed to the ruling class, to convince them that their system is destructive, and they should lay off? I hardly think so.
>
Unless one is involved in Tate Gallery chitchat, you're right, they don't pay so much attention.
> Is it addressed to the Marxist comrades whose failure to predict and influence the course of events has left them in need of some boosting - yes, I think that is probably true, but also
>
> It is addressed to those petit bourgeois who persist in the view that the precariousness of their own social situation is synonymous with the end of the world, for whom perennial disaster is an addiction.
>
We do have a few readers in these latter categories, it has been suggested. But not for me to point fingers, no...
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Doug Henwood wrote:
> And, as I've been saying to Patrick for many years, what he calls "crisis" is often what I call capitalism's standard operating procedure: creating poverty alongside wealth, instability, anxiety, ill-health, alienation, etc. To call them "crises" is to misname them, in fact - the word should be reserved for exceptional states, not an awful daily reality.
Doug, you're just not wanting to follow these accumulation cycles. The amplification of the uneven/combined features of capital in times like these, when capital is more desperate to post short-term profits (because of pressures associated with longer-term surplus value-creating processes, such as overproduction and higher capital-intensity, as well as because of financialisation/speculation). But explaining cycles - and post-1971 crisis management - is something I hope you set your fine mind to, one day.
> If we can't tune our critique to the "normal," then why should anyone listen to us? Instead, they'll just long for a return to the normal, instead of getting off the whole goddamned merry-go-round.
That's certainly a worry, and I'm in ongoing debate with some of the leading Keynesians about it (e.g. www.nea.org/assets/docs/HE/TA09EconomistGalbraith.pdf ).
Ok, will back off now.
Cheers, Patrick