Re: Re: US Consumer Confidence index surges

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

>Louis,
>     Accounting profits go up and down (others can
>do all kinds of things depending on how they are
>measured).  One of the reasons we had the stock
>market bubble was because profits generally went
>up during the 1980s and 1990s, at least in the US,
>although I stand to be corrected by that notorious
>Yale-educated snob if I am wrong.  Much of that
>reflected well-known attacks against the working
>class that succeeded.  One reason the bubble has
>been coming down has been that indeed, profits
>have been declining again recently. But that is hardly
>the same thing as a general, secular tendency to decline.

I think many of the Marxist abc's have to be re-evaluated, but I tend to be
skeptical about seeing them as rooted in the basic logic of Capital. Mostly
I think there has been an underestimation about capital's ability to
displace crisis geographically. Whatever complaints I have about David
Harvey's musings on green issues, on this he has been right on.

I also think that Harry Braverman's reconsideration of some of the abc's in
the pages of American Socialist are worth reviewing:

"All the above difficulties in Marxism obviously stem from the fact that
the capitalist system has persisted, and restabilized itself repeatedly,
over a much longer period than had been expected. The great expansion in
labor productivity which has created such new and different conditions was
not unexpected in the Marxian economic structure, a structure which, as no
other before or since, focused on the technological revolutions which
capitalism is forced to work continuously as a condition of its existence.
What was unexpected was capitalism's length of life and its ability to
expand. Marx and the movement he shaped operated on the basis of imminent
crisis. If he never gave thought to the kind of living standard inherent in
a capitalism that would continue to revolutionize science and industry for
another hundred years, that was because he thought he was dealing with a
system that was rapidly approaching its Armageddon. He thought the social
wars that would usher in socialism would take place under the social
conditions he saw around him. In that sense, the economic obsolescence we
can easily find in him today is of a piece with his errors of political
foreshortening."

http://www.mail-archive.com/marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/msg04887.html

In any case, I will have lots more to say about these sorts of matters
using the question of deregulation as a peg to hang my analysis on.






Louis Proyect
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