Re: Re: failing firms must be "promptly liquidated"

["Fred B. Moseley" <fmoseley@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 1 Nov 2001, Chris Burford wrote:

> At 31/10/01 20:38 -0600, you wrote:
> >On Wednesday, October 31, 2001 at 17:35:00 (-0800) Michael Perelman writes:
> > >Chris, the economy will be stronger after liquidation -- if it survives the
> > >shock -- but it will mean mass unemployment and a further concentration of
> > >economic ownership.
> >
> >      ... liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers,
> >      liquidate real estate.
> >
> >      ---Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, advising Herbert Hoover in
> >      1930
> >
> >
> >Bill
>
>
> Yes, Prof Takagi and Andrew Mellon were perhaps right wing Marxists without
> even knowing it.
>
> Marx described this back in 1848. And of course the destruction of capital,
> includes the destruction of a portion of living variable capital - the
> section of the work force that are thrown out of the capitalist wage system
> until hopefully at some time eventually the capitalist cycle picks up again
> and they have the opportunity to leave the reserve army of labour.
>
> I do not think there is much serious dispute about the overall pattern of
> capitalist cycles, if the bourgeois can permit themselves to be really
> frank (like in an article tucked away on page 12 of the Nikkei Weekly).
>
> The progressive question is what very very little can working people do to
> buck the trend? If there is any influence that can be brought to bear at
> all, it would be better to update mechanisms of social control over the
> production process than merely to try to mitigate cuts in the average real
> wage.
>
> Perhaps the whole apparatus of apparently responsible banking that Takagi
> appears to describe should be updated by making the bidding for development
> or liquidity funds more transparent and democratic and to take into account
> the views of works councils, the local environment and the community.
>
> But the brutality of the overall process is as Marx indicated.


Yes, I agree.


> I think leftist economists should be able to discuss all this quietly and
> penetratingly with the rapidly expanding ranks of neo-Keynesians.


But who else recognizes the centrality of the rate of profit in the
behavior of the macroeconomy?  Who else even has the rate of profit as a
variable in their theory?  I hope there are some such neo-Keynesians that
I have overlooked.

Fred