Paulo,
no one who is sane looks for war. Usually those who are comfortably off, I do not mean rich, certainly don't search the runes for bleak forcasts of war. However it is irresponsible not to be as prepared to try to understand the origins of war as the bourgeoisie themselves. The whole twentieh century was, a Lenin correctly foresaw one of wars and revolutions. The Korean and Vietnam wars represented direct imperialist aggression, as do the current wars in the middle east. Undoubtedly nuclear power made the imperialists hesitate over certain types of conflict, although they did not hesitate to prepare and use it, or continue to threaten to.
I am sure that when you think of the calculated expectation by imperialist politicians that large parts of their own economies and their working class will be destroyed in such wars, (that inter imperialist wars are in fact essentially attacks on the international working class), then your own comment on 'their own markets' might seem quite irrelevant.
I'm afraid your 'back burner' is both an admission of the nature of war in an imperialist epoch, and returns us to the starting point... when do capitalist economic conditions precipitate turning up the gas.
Paul B.
----- Original Message -----
From: Cipolla
To: Outline on Political Economy mailing list
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2008 6:13 PM
Subject: Re: [OPE] Marxist theory of crisis
Dear Paul,
All notes are short when we factor in the complexity of the issues. As I re-read my quest to you it sounded silly to me to ask such a question. Yet, when the conditions for the concrete development of a crisis - from a theoretical point of view - are considered, we can´t just separate credit from competition for credit is an inherent part of competition as you well know. Take this response as a need to understand better how a crisis theory could be developed on the basis of Marx´s indications in the Grundrisse and in the Theories of Surplus Value.
As far as imperialism your logic draws on Lenis/Bukharin views of imperialism as capital competition at an international level backed up by their respective states of origin. But important changes have occured such that might have made war less advantageous. Consider for instance the fact that the major markets for investments for the central imperialist countries are their own markets. Could we preserve Lenis´s logic of competition applied intenationally and at the same time take into account changes that may have modified the relations beteewn imperialist states? That is, beligerancy is still there but kept in the back burner by the rising of common markets.
Paulo
----- Original Message -----
From: paul bullock
To: Outline on Political Economy mailing list
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2008 10:20 PM
Subject: Re: [OPE] Marxist theory of crisis
Paulo,
competition is incorporated see ' the other competing private owners' , I take it for granted that no body here imagines that a struggle for markets isn't taking place as capital struggles to realise the surplus value it extorts from the masses. As for credit, or indeed interest, then I left that to one side, or rather spoke only of the inadequate rate of returns 'provoking banks into inventive schemes to revive the respiratory system of capital' because I wanted to stress the final desperate behaviour of a class that has outlived any ordinary expectations of 'respectable' returns on loans (we are not speaking here of trade credit, although this too is 'securitised').
However is such a condensed note, which aims to emphasise the fact that system has to drive to 'really effective warfare between capitals', ie inter imperialist warfare, I had no intention of going over everything.
Paul
----- Original Message -----
From: Cipolla
To: Outline on Political Economy mailing list
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2008 6:10 PM
Subject: Re: [OPE] Marxist theory of crisis
Hi Paul,
After you derive the tendency to crisis from the nature of capital shouldn´t you incorporate competition and credit in order to see how those tendencies develop concretely into a crisis?
Paulo
----- Original Message -----
From: paul bullock
To: Outline on Political Economy mailing list
Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2008 10:19 AM
Subject: Re: [OPE] Marxist theory of crisis
Unfortunately Paula,
most references to the LRTRPF are usually quite mechanical , and indeed often seem to treat 'it' as a 'cause', so reducing the whole of Marx's theory into the sort of limited causal model so entrenched in the empricist mind.
This rate is a phenomenal form, a further expression of the rising organic composition of capital. That rising organic composition itself reflects an historic investment, by a fractious and competitive society, in scientific development. This promotes a technical composition of capital designed to expel the variable, troublesome, element of capital investment, payment of wages. Science in the hands of privateers.
The rising technical composition - labour /machine loadings are partial indicators of this - and so also the economies of scale it requires, finds a monetary reflection, the rising organic composition of capital. This then further allows an expression in a tendency for the rate of profit to fall when we relate it to the surplus value extracted in the process. This decline can only be inhibited by intensified efforts to increase the rate of exploitation on the one hand and to destroy, peacefully or otherwise, the capacity of the other competing private owners altogether, their infrastructure, so laying the ground for widening the markets that your own economies of scale require.
Simulataneously then, without really effective warfare between capitals, we have overproduction of commodities as products - to much output against existing markets - thus too much capital investment, too much money in the hands of capitalists which settles into hoards, provoking banks into inventive schemes to revive the respiratory system of capital..... until the margins are cut so fine that.... crash!!! All this of course against the constant increase in the rate of exploitation, the time it takes to reproduce the working masses employed by capital... the constant cheapening of their lives, as well as the abuse of nature per se.
The opponents of this nasty scenario - the prospect of an ever more brutal, continuous internecine warfare on a global scale - will of course rush forward with the claim that the organic composition doesn't rise, that science will save us by 'cheapening' constant capital... and all will be well if only reason can modify the various imbalances in the system... which is of course so very complicated!
But constant capital as machinery is always being cheapened! The point is that as a mass of capital it has always to be counterposed to a smaller relative value of variable capital, otherwise profits will decline even more dramatically.
'Fundamentally' capitalism systematically produces crises as a result of its 'nature'.
Paul
----- Original Message -----
From: Paula
To: Outline on Political Economy mailing list
Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2008 7:01 AM
Subject: Re: [OPE] Marxist theory of crisis
Thanks, Paul B. and David. Do you think the present crisis is also fundamentally due to the long-run tendency of the rate of profit to fall?
Paula
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