Robert Naiman wrote:
Is there any case, in the last 100 years, when an industrial democracy
has experienced anything like the Great Depression, without it being
abetted by contractionary government policy?
...there is no danger of a "Great Depression" so long as you have
reasonable government policy?
But Bob, you're sounding unreasonably Keynesian. What's a Marxist
rebuttal? Maybe that with lubrication from the central bank, you can
displace these crises into new spheres of financial bubble-shifting
(which in effect is Bernanke's strategy), heightened uneven development
(the $'s decline being one major geographical feature of moving the
valorisation around), or inflation-inducing deficit spending... but
without addressing the underlying cause of the overaccumulation of
fictitious capital - which is in the overaccumulation of capital in the
productive sectors dating back some decades but intensifying with the
East Asian manufacturing boom of the 1990s-2000s - then you end up...
just like Japan since 1990: in slow-motion
depression/recession/stagnation for ages and ages.
Would you agree: the Great Depression was "solved" by two processes:
first, war which wiped out vast amounts of economic deadwood and
artificially restoked US industrial production under conditions of
fordist planning, and second, restructured social/political relations
which gave capital the stability in terms of productive (labor-capital
social contracts) and financial/trade (Bretton Woods) systems, to assure
a new round of accumulation.
And that sort of *resolution* isn't on the cards, as far as I can tell.
Isn't that the sort of argument we need to stress, to distinguish
Marxist from garden-variety Keynesian riffs? I dunno, but would like to
hear your and others' viewpoints.
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