[A-List] Top economist says America could plunge into recession

["Charles Brown" <charlesb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Top economist says America could plunge into recession
Carrol Cox 

Recessions are essential to the health of capitalism --- and they have
come quite regularly over the entire history of industrial capitalism.
Whether one is coming now or in two years, one _will_ of course come.
Such repeated events are of very little political interest (though
they
often coincide with the switch from Demireps to Republicrats or vice
versa).

It is worth speculating (as long as one remembers it is pure
speculation
and not a prediction) on the possibility/likelihood of some recession
in
(say) the next 20 years turning into that very rare phenomenon, A
Depression. (One in the 1870s, another in the 1930s, none since.) A
depression, unlike a recession, runs on for a lengthy period of time,
with internal ups and downs (up in 1936, down in 1938), and the
_upticks_ within a depression can be a time of huge left growth.
Recessions, on the other hand, are almost always bad for left
politics,
for they depress and individualize people;, sending them scurrying for
individual survival with no time nor energy for politics.

Carrol


^^^^^
CB:  Agreed. The key point in _Capital_ is not the business cycle, but
the Absolute General Law of Capitalist Accumulation , by which growing
wealth at one pole continuously immiseration at the opposite pole. Also,
US capitalism has certain socio-geographical pockets or blockades in
which recession and even depression is permanent - like Detroit ,
Michigan for the last 30 years. I say Detroit is like Cuba , under
capitalist blockade to investment since 1973.

Marx noted the impact of the business cycle on the _bourgeois_
consciousness:


The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society
impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the
changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and
whose crowning point is the universal crisis. That crisis is once again
approaching, although as yet but in its preliminary stage; and by the
universality of its theatre and the intensity of its action it will drum
dialectics even into the heads of the mushroom-upstarts of the new, holy
Prusso-German empire. 

Karl Marx
London
January 24, 1873

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm 




Karl Marx 
Capital Volume One 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1873
Afterword to the Second German Edition

^^^^^^^^


Karl Marx. Capital Volume One


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chapter Twenty-Five: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation

...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