Chaos theory and vicious cycle

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

This morning, London time, Asian markets are talking of a vicious cycle,
with falls in the price of chip makers and cars.

In terms of chaos theory, a vicious cycle is when a change in a variable
has a positive effect on the next chronological event in a repetitive
(iterative) process. It is a positive cascade.

Most systems are kept stable by negative feedback. There indeed is some of
that. For example a financial analyst this morning noted that the FTSE has
discounted earnings for next year by 45%, but at the moment, he said "fear
is driving the market".

The dangerous positive feedback loop includes of course cuts in the
production of the means of production in significant sectors, laying off of
workers as living capital. And the fear of unemployment and other
insecurities lead individual consumers still at work, to cut their
expenditure, thereby increasing the risk of further lay offs of
workers/consumers. They are thereby unwittingly tightening the noose around
their collective neck.

In marxist terms these are epiphenomena: there is a finite amount of
exchange value in an economy, and if capital can no longer accumulate
despite the limited purchasing power of the masses, parts of it must be
destroyed.

But the mechanisms are interesting for the timing and phases and can also
influence the level at which the system restabilises itself. Negative
feedback loops are generally stable, or lead to oscillations with broad
parameters.

Positive feedback loops, vicious cycles (or virtuous cycles), are the
prelude to a sudden qualitative change in the phenomena.

In terms of materialist dialectics, quantitative change leads to sudden
qualitative change. In a matter of days, the global economy can swing into
a phase in which production operates at a far lower level of activity. In a
matter of days, the economic orthodoxy of laissez faire monetarism, is
swept away. Nothing is out of the frame for regulating the global economy -
for the sake of global capital.

At this qualitatively critical time,  anti-capitalist protestors must not
slacken their efforts even if they change their tactics. They must get in
there *leading* with initiatives to ensure that the stabilisation is on a
basis that benefits the people of the world, including the marginalised who
have turned to radical islam as a focus for their opposition to the Empire
of Capital.

Chris Burford

London