[Pen-l] which parts of capital are getting destroyed?

["Chris Burford" <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

As it is still possible to get cash out of a hole in the wall and 
commentators get more relaxed about the recession and the falling stock 
exchanges, there seems to be a spread of opinion opening up about how deep 
and how long the global recession will last.

Although I think it is clear that the marxian law of value (as it is 
probably more carefully described, since the classical economists also held 
a labour theory of value) clearly assumes a limit cycle.

Crises are quite normal under capitalism.

Even allowing for the elasticity of capital, and for the fact that exchange 
value is expressed in units that tend to expand in quantity and deflate in 
individual value, with the growth of modern economies, it still looks like a 
recognisable limit cycle.

But there is still a murky picture about whether the credit default swap 
froth is still to collapse, or whether it is in practice really understood 
to be the froth of extreme elasticity of capital, and will just get blown 
away.

So what capital has been destroyed now and how much more needs to be 
destroyed before the rate of profit can rise again sufficiently?

Clearly the marginal subprime mortgages are written down, because the need 
to accumulate came up against the limited purchasing power of the masses, 
and the elastic band flipped back.

It is not clear to me whether there is also real loss of capital in the 
contraction of financial services in which the vast quantity of derivatives, 
actually clipped a slice off the total available surplus value in the 
economy, like land does, in marxian terms.

How much more capital must be destroyed in the real economy for the rate of 
profit to start rising again in due course? Presumably the battle is whether 
the economy in which that recovery takes place is assumed to be a mass 
consumer economy, or a narrower elitist consumer market for the 
extraordinarily rich.

How much more capital, and what sorts of capital must still be destroyed?

Chris Burford
London 

_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l