Re: creative destruction

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I had a double take on reading this, as it took me some time to check out
it is by Schumpeter.

Apart from the reference to steel and to a 'biologic term' it could have
been written by Marx could it not? 

- at least that creative destruction is an essential feature of
capitalism if not the essential feature

Marx assumes that profit and wages are a zero sum game. In crises of
overproduction capital, one way or another, must be destroyed, for the
system to get going again. No?

Chris Burford




At 2003-07-12 16:55 -0700, Michael wrote:
> I never gave this passage much thought. 
> Look at the example he uses -- US
> Steel, which was a project to limit competitive and eventually,
> probably
> inevitably became a stodgy burnt out testimony to failure.  Am I the
> only
> one to see an irony?
>
>
>
> 83: "The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and
> the
> organizational development from craft shop and factory to such concerns
> as
> U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation -- if I
> may
> use a biological term -- that incessantly revolutionizes the
> economic
> structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one,
> incessantly
> creating a new one.  This process of Creative Destruction is the
> essential
> fact about capitalism.  It is what capitalism consists in and what
> every
> capitalist concern has got to live in."