From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Wed Aug 01 2007 - 17:12:43 EDT
Hi Juriiaan:
Yes, Michael H's article has stirred up some controversy. Below you will
find Loren Goldner's response to another list. Loren takes a very
different position, as might be anticipated. I don't think his
assertions about a "decadent phase of capitalism" are all that convincing.
Yet, I am not convinced by all of Michael's claims either.
In solidarity, Jerry
Michael Heinrich's scenario may be right. I say this
as one of the people on the radical left who, since
the 1970's, has diagnosed the crisis which began then
as
the "final" one, to result in either world revolution
or
recovery from something like World War III. I say this
because in the early 70's I would have flatly denied
the possibility of the configuration of the
contemporary world, with China's decades of rapid
growth and now India's emergence, for starters.
In short, I have been somewhat sobered by being
consistently wrong about capitalism's flexibility
(whatever the balance sheet of horrors it has served
up since the early 70's).
However, (and I am not even mentioning the
environmental questions Heinrich passes over in
silence) there are a number of problems with
Heinrich's analysis that would require further
explanation. He does not comment, for example, on the
crucial differences between the current emergence of
China and India and the emergence of the U.S. and
Germany ca. 1890.
That earlier development ultimately "lifted all boats"
in the 1945-1974 boom years, whereas even the rosy
scenarios for China and India frankly admit that 1.5
billion people in those countries will be "left out".
What will become of them and how will they react?
Heinrich scoffs at the idea that the purpose of
capitalism is to provide good wages and welfare for
workers, which is true enough,
but such a formulation overlooks Marx's view that
capitalism was historically progressive because it
materially expanded the reproduction of society. If
capitalism destroys society (i.e.the working class)
while "booming" for capitalists, or if it destroys the
environment and shortcircuits all possible social
reproduction, Heinrich's portrait of the future will
be meaningless.
I have myself argued in different texts that the
defeat of the old revolutionary movement (particularly
in 1917-1921, and to a lesser extent the explosion of
1968-1977) occurred precisely because capitalism had
new territories into which it could expand. But this
expansion does not change the fact that something
fundamental seemed to change in capitalist
accumulation around the time of World War I. Broadly
speaking, pre-1914 capitalist growth expanded the
working class
as a percentage of the world capitalist population.
German and American competition squeezed the
circumstances of British workers, true enough, but
capitalist innovation was creating new proletarians
all the time, not eliminating them. The situation
today is quite different. The rise of the new Asian
economies happens at the EXPENSE of the working class
in the West. There is a net contraction, in value
terms, of the global social wage. Heinrich doesn't
mention that even China has LOST 20 million industrial
jobs through its boom, and 100 million layoffs were
announced at the party congress in 1997. Korea, hailed
as the "next Japan" 20 years ago, is today being
squeezed by Chinese competition as China moves "up the
value chain". Vietnam and Bangladesh have surpassed
China in the race to the bottom in wages. Outsourcing
to India has raised wages in the high tech sector to
the point that, already, the costs of outsourcing are
becoming not worth the trouble.
Heinrich mentions two world wars, the great
depression, fascism and the Holocaust as if they were
some anomaly, when in fact they signaled a qualitative
break from the nature of crisis in capitalism in the
1815-1914 period.
There are those of us, and I am one of them, who see
in those events a "decadent" phase of capitalism. Does
Heinrich imagine that the U.S. will peacefully hand
its imperial status over to the Asian powers, any more
than Britain lost its hegemony to America through
exactly the decades of upheaval he describes?
These are just some of the questions I would raise.
Perhaps 50 years from now they will appear as
irrelevant, and in fact based on developments that
were indeed anomalies. I have been wrong often enough
to
be modest in predictions. But there is a complacency
that comes through Heinrich's (admittedly short)
historical overview that communicates a "nothing new
under the sun" view that plays fast and loose with
both history and the present.
Loren
>
http://negativepotential.blogsport.de/2007/07/27/profit-without-
end/
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