Re: [OPE] Britain--parasitic and decaying capitalism: A comment

From: Dave Zachariah <davez@kth.se>
Date: Tue Dec 29 2009 - 19:14:32 EST

Hi Dogan,

On 2009-12-30 00:10, you wrote:
> If you take the term "stage" then you may see more clearly what it
> means. It is used to differentiate and define stages with their
> apparent differences in the development of capitalism. But if you look
> at Hobson's and Lenin's books they investigate and analyse the whole
> internal structure of capital, society and the state: rise of
> monopolies, merge of industrial and bank capital and domination of
> financial capital, the end of democracy and accomplishment of the
> division of the world and so on.
> does it make any sense to you to differ between stages in the
> development of capitalism?
It does, but despite the merits of Hobson's and Lenin's analysis the
framework is inadequate given the hindsight of the 20th century.

The way, say, the British and French economies operated globally between
1870-1945 are significantly different from the mechanisms by which the
US economy has dominated it after WWII. Science does advance after all
and there are numerous theoretical and empirical problems of the old
theory that have been brought up in this thread by now.

> It is always the same way you choose to communicate: to say always
> what is not is but never what is: what is the imperialism according to
> your approach?
Perhaps I have the misfortune of remembering the past posts in this
thread. But I quite clearly gave a working definition of the specificity
of imperialism in the very first post.

I hope I can clarify my take here:

    Capitalist imperialism is the policy of extra-economic coercion used
    by states to enable capitalist relations of production and surplus
    appropriation in regions where they either do not exist or are resisted.

In addition I would say that the global political economy has become
dominated by the rentier interest or 'finance' since the end of the
1970s. The growth of the unproductive financial sector has been
detrimental both to the working-classes as well as accumulation of the
real capital stock.

//Dave Z
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Received on Tue Dec 29 19:16:20 2009

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