JAI: Selections. Entire article (with thecomments belwo is posted) at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/marx-to-market-09142011.html ).
[Marxism] Bloomberg: Marx is Right johnaimani johnaimani at earthlink.net Tue Oct 18 12:18:27 MDT 2011 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- September 14, 2011, 11:07 PM EDT "Marx to Market" (selected quotes from the article) Instability "One of Marx's most important contentions was that capitalism was inherently unstable. One only has to look at the headlines out of Europe---which is haunted by the specter of a possible Greek default, a banking disaster, and the collapse of the single-currency euro zone---to see that he was right. Marx diagnosed capitalism's instability at a time when his contemporaries and predecessors, such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, were mostly enthralled by its ability to serve human wants." Reserve Army of Labor "Marx predicted that companies would need fewer workers as they improved productivity, creating an "industrial reserve army" of the unemployed whose existence would keep downward pressure on wages for the employed. It's hard to argue with that these days, given that the U.S. unemployment rate is still more than 9 percent. On Sept. 13 the U.S. Census Bureau released data showing that median income fell from 1973 through 2010 for full-time, year-round male workers aged 15 and up, adjusted for inflation. The condition of blue-collar workers in the U.S. is still a far cry from the subsistence wage and "accumulation of misery" that Marx conjured. But it's not morning in America, either." JB Say's 'Law' "Marx loved to bash French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, who argued that general gluts cannot exist because the market will always match supply and demand. Marx argued that overproduction was in fact endemic to capitalism because the proletariat isn't paid enough to buy the stuff that the capitalists produce. Again, that theory has lately been hard to dispute. The only way blue-collar Americans managed to maintain consumption in the last decade was by overborrowing. When the housing market collapsed, many were left with crippling debt." Bourgeois kow-tows "Marx has gotten an attentive reading recently from the likes of New York University economist Nouriel Roubini and George Magnus, the London-based senior economic adviser to UBS Investment Bank. Magnus's employer, Switzerland-based UBS, is a pillar of the financial establishment, with offices in more than 50 countries and over $2 trillion in assets. Yet in an Aug. 28 essay for Bloomberg View, Magnus wrote that "today's global economy bears some uncanny resemblances" to what Marx foresaw." (JAI: Where the article is incorrect is in its proposition that:) "What Marx and his acolytes underappreciated was capitalism's power to heal itself. It may have been his fatal intellectual mistake." (JAI: Many times Marx remarked (esp Vol 3m Chap XV, Sec 3 "Excess Capital, Excess Population) upon the benefits of crisis to capitalism (and more so to the larger capitals) of the destruction of--in the main--lesser capitals by enabling these survivors to pick at the bones (read: stripping assets, gaining market share, etc) of fallen competitors. E.g.: "...the fall in prices and the competitive struggle would have driven every capitalist to lower the individual value of his total product below its general value by means of new machines, new and improved working methods, new combinations, i.e., to increase the productivity of a given quantity of labour, to lower the proportion of variable to constant capital, and thereby to release some labourers; in short, to create an artificial over-population. Ultimately, the depreciation of the elements of constant capital would itself tend to raise the rate of profit. The mass of employed constant capital would have increased in relation to variable, but its value could have fallen. The ensuing stagnation of production would have prepared - within capitalistic limits - a subsequent expansion of production. http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch15.htm (JAI: And Henryk Grossmann to no end pointed to the same things more than once in his "Law of the Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System". E.g.) "We know that in Marx's conception crises are simply a healing process of the system, a form in which equilibrium is again re-established, even if forcibly and with huge losses. From the standpoint of capital every crisis is a 'crisis of purification'. Soon the accumulation process picks up again, on an expanded basis, and within certain limits.it can proceed without any disruption of equilibrium. But 'beyond certain limits', from point r2on, the accumulated capital again grows too large. The mass of surplus value starts to decline, valorisation begins to slacken until finally.it evaporates completely in the way described earlier. The breakdown sets in again and is followed by devaluation of capital.and so on." (JAI: No. Marx (and Grossmann) knew as we Marxists know that capitalism is at once as much a self-stinging scorpion as it is a blood-sucking vampier bat. Self-inflicted stings yield a carcass that from the rot of its own stinking flesh (crises) rises again and again a funky Sisypheian Phoenix (pun intended as regards Arpaioville) of an economy that takes wing (expansion) only to flounder, crash and burn (higher level of crises) taking down with it not only its own weaker members but the mass of completely totally innocent working class. But isn't it now seeing its last resurrection?) 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