James Devine wrote:
Capitalism always involves a contradiction between capital's interest (the long-term interest of the capitalist class as a whole) and those of competing individual capitalists. (One might liken this contradiction to the "public goods problem" of orthodox economics, though of course there's another contradiction that's more important, that between classes. So it's a "collective goods problem" for the capitalists.)
I fully agree.
My only point here is that contradictions end up resolving themselves -- in this case, politically. As Marx says in Hegelian jargon, given the conditions, a difference evolves into a contradiction, which in turn evolves into an antagonism, which bursts and thus "reestablishes the unity" (Grundrisse). So I just tried to imagine what the end of the sequence would be.
The interests of individual capitalists are tied to their collective interest and, of course, vice versa. It's a chicken and egg question or -- as we used to say -- dialectics. If something makes sense for the class as a whole, some individual capitalist mind comes up with the idea. The idea takes a while to be pondered, it is assaulted by the conventional wisdom, impeded by hardened conditions, etc., but eventually -- if it keeps making sense -- more capitalists adopt it and set to remove the conditions that restrain its realization. Making sense in individual capitalist minds and in their aggregate or collective consciousness is a matter of crass cost-benefit analysis.
At the end of the day, it'll be the concrete, contingent political battle which will decide what course the U.S. capitalists will end up choosing and, as a result of the clash of their choice against those of others, something will happen (always constrained by the laws of nature and inherited history). What Marx's method does is give us a way to sort this messy process out -- roughly. Because some broad tendencies are implied as Hegelian "necessities" by the "logic" of the present conditions.
Julio
_________________________________________________________________ MSN Amor: busca tu ½ naranja http://latino.msn.com/autos/
