[PEN-L:6913] Re: rising rate of profit? -Reply

[Patrick Bond <PATRICK@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ok, if we're meant to be heard from the periphery, let's not miss this
moment of yankee silence. Patrick in Johannesburg chiming in on Doug's
puzzle:

Because of the reasons Jim's laid out, I'm less satisfied with relying upon
the search for relative and absolute surplus value as the key way of
understanding countervailing forces to the tendency of declining profit
rates.

And likewise I think because of the empirical problems mentioned, the
difficulty in relating value categories to positivist measurement
techniques, and in any case the shift of profit centres within the "hollow
corporation" (from productive circuits of K to financial/merchant circuits),
we'll just end up running around in circles saying this or that about
declining profit rates.

Isn't it more fruitful to explore the two other concepts I've always thought
were central to Marx's crisis theory:  rising organic composition of K and
the overaccumulation problem?

In which case, what about also invoking -- instead of countervailing
tendencies -- the concept of _displacement_ of crisis tendencies?

Some have worked on spatial and temporal displacement, meaning
moving the problem of overaccumulation around by generating more
intense processes of uneven capitalist geographical development, or
moving it through time, both in terms of more rapid turnover time of capital
(including speeding-up the work process) as well as displacement into
the future using credit and other financial instruments which allow
overaccumulation to be mopped up today and, potentially, paid for
tomorrow.

All of which only keep the problem in motion, growing worse in some
ways but always changing form and differentially affecting
local/regional/global class alliances, but without yet, it seems, resolving
generalised overaccumulation through a widespread (1930s-40s style)
devalorisation of the economic deadwood.

If there's anything to this conception of crisis, what's still missing is an
understanding of scale:  how the processes of crisis formation and
displacement have inexorably moved from local to global, and how
resistance is belatedly following (in various stop-start ways). Likewise,
understanding whether the rejigging of accumulation will be a largely
local/national process (as in the 1930s on the periphery and late 1940s in
the Keynesian world). We've not had a seminal work that builds the
uneven development of scale into conceptions of overaccumulation
crisis.

So, that's what is occupying some of us here in SA -- and in other
pockets -- as what were once considered reliable conceptions of
functional apartheid-capitalist race-class relations, internal dependency,
articulations of modes of production, post-(racial)fordism and all the rest
of the failed poli-econ conceptions of the 1960s-80s fall away.

Enough theoretical babble. Does this resonate anywhere else?

Ciao!

Patrick