[lbo-talk] 70's "structural crisis" created America's finance economy?

Ferenc Molnar ferenc_molnar at hotmail.com
Wed Mar 30 12:32:24 PDT 2011



>From the LRB's review of Judith Stein's "Pivotal Decade". 

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As Judith Stein observes in "Pivotal Decade", the 1970s was the only decade except for the 1930s during which Americans grew poorer. By the late 1960s, around a quarter of all new investment by US companies in electrical and non-electrical machinery, transportation equipment, rubber and chemical manufacturing was being made abroad. As the new decade began the US suffered its first trade deficit since 1893. By its end productivity had slowed and turned negative; the US share of the world market for manufactured goods shrank by 23 per cent. America’s share of world steel production shrank from 50 to 20 per cent. Only the UK had a lower rate of gross capital formation as a percentage of GDP.

Stein argues that this was a fundamental structural crisis, not merely a low point in the economic cycle. Core sectors of American industrial capitalism could no longer compete: plant and equipment were increasingly antiquated; productivity was declining compared to European and Japanese producers, whose revival had been made possible by Cold War imperatives. Trade, currency and other measures favoured Western Europe and Japan even when that meant loading American industry with burdens it couldn’t bear: this was the price of empire. At the beginning of the decade members of a still powerful labour movement, deploying the leverage it enjoyed thanks to Vietnam War-generated full employment, went on strike in numbers not seen since the wave of strikes that followed World War Two. But the administrations of Nixon, Ford and Carter weren’t particularly moved by the industrialists’ troubles. Later, the double-dip oil shocks that followed the Opec embargo of 1973 and then the Iranian Revolution of 1979 served to ratchet up the costs of production in an increasingly oil-dependent economy.

Profit rates shrank as the nominal value of US industry’s assets greatly exceeded their real worth in the international marketplace. Capital began flowing elsewhere, not just into Europe but also into select parts of the Third World, and into non-industrial sectors – finance especially but also real estate, retail and service businesses – and into an increasing array of leveraged speculations in corporate and government securities. So began the deindustrialisation of America, the shutting down of what had for a century been the engine house of the economy. A whole way of life was headed for extinction.

It is not merely in hindsight that we can see this as a structural crisis. "Pivotal Decade" makes it quite clear that remnants of the New Deal coalition, including the trade unions and labour liberals, recognised that something other than conventional postwar Keynesian fiscal and monetary policy was called for. Even the sclerotic bureaucracy running the major trade unions pressed hard for industrial and even national economic planning: a full employment bill that would legally oblige the government to guarantee jobs, either by creating them in the public sector or by encouraging private investment; a new development bank to help steer capital to ageing sectors of American industry and to help new ones get started; government sponsorship of regional and infrastructural development, and more.None of this happened despite some political and business support. Keynesian orthodoxy had long since abandoned any serious interest in structural economic reform, government planning or frontal attempts to redistribute wealth and income. What began as a political decision aimed at warding off postwar Red-baiters had evolved into an intellectual conviction sustained by postwar prosperity. Democrats and Republicans alike embraced a policy of demand management through the manipulation of tax rates and government spending. Nixon ventured furthest from orthodoxy when, after the devaluation of the dollar in 1971, he toyed with wage and price controls, a risky and quickly jettisoned foray into ‘command economics’. Once conventional Keynesianism collapsed the result was stagflation, with simultaneous postwar highs for unemployment and inflation, a combination once thought to be impossible. The old liberal order was discredited and the organised working class blamed for the mess.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n06/steve-fraser/thanks-to-the-tea-party



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