This just showed up as a comment on my blog. I had mentioned Bill
Jeffries in my article as a critic of the kind of doom-and-gloom
economics of Hillel Ticktin and Shawn Hattingh.
Bill Jeffries:
The point about over-accumulation is that it has to be relative to
profit rates, it is in effect the same thing as saying that the rate
of profit is falling.
Ticktin in his article claims that the rate of profit is falling, but
produces no empirical data to substantiate his claim.
Chris Harman to his credit, at least tries to engage with the data in
his latest article in ISJ 118, and registers the fact that most
Marxist and bourgeois economics commentators, refer to the recovery
in profit rates since the turn of the millennium, but then dismisses
them, preferring instead to go with Robert Brenner.
Brenner, pretty much alone of the castrophists has at least tried to
work out the rate of profit, but his estimates critically leave out
financial profits, which now account for 40% of all profits,
executive remuneration, which has doubled as a proportion of national
income over the last couple of decades and foreign profits, which
have similarly doubled.
His estimate for the rate of profit does not then include the
majority of profits, unsurprisingly therefore, it doesn't show a
great recovery.
How then to explain the present crisis if rates of profit have
generally recovered? Firstly of course, there has been a decline in
the USA since around mid 2006, although only marginally it should be
said. I think the present crisis can be best explained as a major
disproportion in one section of production - residential housing -
combined with a major financial crisis - rather than a general crisis
of over-accumulation.
If this is correct of course, it means that there will not be a great
depression or anything like it, even if the present US crisis still
has some way to go, but that its effects will be very significantly
offset by the growth of the world economy, which is not so dependent
on US consumer demand as the left would have us believe.
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