[PEN-L:28246] Re: Something strange about this crisis

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 20/07/02 11:32 -0400, Louis Proyect wrote:
> Chris Burford wrote:
>
> > It is not clear that this crisis in the west
> > has yet significantly reduced the purchasing power of the masses, (as
> > opposed to their nominal assets). It is just possible that there could be
> > a massive destruction of capital values without causing a crash in the
> > circulation of the main economy. 
>
>
> We are dealing with a worldwide economic crisis, of which the recent
> stock market collapse in the USA is only a component. On nearly every
> front you are dealing with contracting economies, with Turkey and
> Argentina serving as notable examples in the semiperipheral arena.
> Meanwhile peripheral countries have been suffering a complete economic
> collapse for the past decade when neoliberal reforms were supposedly
> lifting all boats. The NY Times article dealing with protests in Peru
> goes into detail about the current situation in Latin America, while the
> Bono/O'Neill trip to Africa generated a ton of words about the utter
> failure of capitalist "development" in Africa. Meanwhile, on
> Friday night PBS aired a fascinating documentary on the skewed nature of
> development in China.
> (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/).
> On one hand you have billionaires and aspiring millionaires working with
> western capitalist trade organizations; on the other hand you have
> migrant laborers chopping wood for 80 cents a day. 900 million Chinese
> live in the countryside, among whom probably half are wage earners or
> farmers. Most impartial commentators believe that unemployment is about
> 15 percent in the country and will grow rapidly as the country becomes
> integrated into the world capitalist economy. This means that the 75
> million people not working will be joined by many millions
> more.


I very much agree with the thrust of this. It is essential to see the
global economy as a global unit and to follow the uneven movement of
value within it. The mass of accumulated capital in the USA and the rest
of the west is the other side of the coin to the immiseration of the
masses of the world.  Even where there are some compensations in
that just possibly China, or East Asia as a whole might provide a
counterweight to US hegemonism, this is at a great price.

> The most promising thing about the stock
> market crash is that it has the capacity to wake people up to such global
> realities. The power of the media to project TINA has been enormous. It
> has disoriented leftists for more than a decade now. Instead of seeing
> the failure of capitalism, they stare in wonder at its secondary aspects,
> such as the rise of the dot.coms and the spread of Starbucks into every
> nook and cranny of the world. They meld techno-optimism with Marxoid
> jargon influenced by an undialectical reading of the Communist Manifesto
> and come to the conclusion that the system is working, but only in need
> of reform. It is what I would call neo-Bernsteinism.


 Virtually everyone is in favour of reforms now. The question is how
radical are they, and what class interest do they serve. And how will
they modify rather than abolish the fundamental contradiction between the
accumulation of capital and the limited purchasing power of the masses.

Even those who call for the abolition of the IMF and the World Bank have
to take into account that others are debating reforms, and also
that the momentum of the world anti-capital movement has abated since
Sept 11. I think a danger for the left is that capitalism is almost
infinitely adaptable. 

While I can see that some would criticise the danger of neo-Bernsteinism,
I cannot see that anyone believes we are near the moment of a decisive
forceful change of political power. It is hard to conceive of a march of
millions storming the offices of the IMF and the World Bank within the
next five years, and defenestrating their executives.  And would
that make the decisive difference if international finance capital was
still free to use all its networked contacts to continue to accumulate,
accumulate, accumulate?

But I would not want to lose the main points in the article I quoted. It
seemed to be arguing that in late finance capitalism, fictious capital
really is fictitious capital squared (I would have myself to check Marx's
usage of the term). 

It could also imply that the crisis in the USA could remain largely
restricted to a write off of capital values within sector II without
affecting circulation within sector I of the economy in the drastic way
this has occurred in Argentina. If that happened in the
USA     jjust conceivably you could get people from
all strata of society banging on the shutters of the banks, including the
IMF and the World Bank. But would that be the same as seizing political
power over the means of production, distribution and exchange? And at the
moment it looks as if people in the USA and Britain could come out of the
global recession very comfortably compared to the misery in many parts of
the world, at the cost of having to work part time past retirement age.

Chris Burford

London