[PEN-L:28247] Re: Re: Something strange about this crisis

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Burford wrote:

>  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.

Everybody is in favor of "reforms" except Marxists, at least the real
ones. This crisis allows us to explain the nature of the system, which
is stacked in the favor of the rich. Countless articles about the
insider games that make the rich richer should be explained in class
terms, not "bad apples".

> 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.

Capitalism is only adaptible in the sense that it will choose either
war, unemployment, environmental despoliation, etc. among a range of
measures to ensure its continuing hegemony. None of these solutions
benefit working people. We have different class interests.

> 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?

Millions *are* marching right now, but not in the imperialist centers
where the class struggle is not as advanced. If the people of London
were forced to pay something like 25% of their income for the right to
drink water as was the case in Bolivia, there would powerful
demonstrations. Our goal as Marxists is to help workers in places like
London identify with their class brothers and sisters in places like
Bolivia even though the leftwing political culture of Great Britain has
been debased by Stalinist reformism or Trotskyist sectarianism for
several generations. A new left is necessary.

> 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).

I wouldn't get carried away with the Guardian article. In fact the
problems faced by an outfit like Global Crossing are not that different
from those experienced in railroad in the 1880s. Fiberoptics and
railroad tracks cost huge amounts of money to deploy but nobody can
determine whether it will be profitable in the long run. That's the way
the capitalist system works. It perpetually overshoots during a period
of expansion and then "corrects" itself through wars, unemployment and
the prison system.

> 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?

No. To find out what happens in a revolution, I suggest you read Leon
Trotsky's classic history of the Russian revolution which is  online at
marxists.org.


--

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org