Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Historical Materialism

[Rakesh Bhandari <rakeshb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>
> > except that it illuminates what is plain for all to see--the
> > importance not greater purchasing power as a 'solution' and/or
> > solution but of the destruction and the devaluation of capital in
> > the restoration of profitability, accumulation and therefore the
> > realization of surplus value.
>
> Liquidate liquidate liquidate - this is Mellon and the prophets!
>
> Doug

But even Mellon here belies the optimistic faith, soon to be
shattered, that society can master its own crises as long as there is
no political interference with sharp and short downturns.   Yet as
Adolf Lowe remarked after the world war "the crises intrinsic to the
capitalist system have lost their virulence; but if we consider an
international destruction of value like the world war as the modern
form of crisis in the age of imperialism, and there is much to be
said for the view, there is little room for extravagant hopes of
'spontaneous stabilization.'"  Quoted in Mattick, Economic Crisis and
Crisis Theory, p. 120

Doug, as I understand value theory, there is a prediction of an
inevitable dialectical proces of disturbances, contradictions, and
crises--not an absolute, purely economic impossibility of
accumulation, but a constant alternation between the overcoming of
crisis and its reproduction at a higher level until the destruction
of the underlying social relations by the working class or the
self-emancipation of peanuts.

rb