One reasonably informed UK news anchorman, today commented that the bank crisis is now causing a severe and deep general economic crisis.
Another commentator on Newsnight argued that today we saw the "spillover" of the banking crisis into the real economy. Although this is the surface appearance, from a Marxian point of view this mistakes the fundamental process of causation, does it not? >From that point of view, capitalism as a system is always vulnerable to periodic crises because of the fundamental contradiction between the social character of production and the private character of appropriation. This expresses itself in the endless need for capital to accumulate, which comes up repeatedly against the limited purchasing power of the masses. A financial crisis is a *symptom* not a *cause* of this fundamental contradiction, is it not? This remains so even when a wobbly economy has tried to continue to maintain circulation by means of relentless deficit spending and the creation of ever more elastic creations of capital. These include appearing to supply attainable housing to working class people on mortgages, that are sustainable only if warm economic summers never cease. They also include credit default insurance which is supposed never to involve real risk, but only give the opportunity for clipping a proportion of surplus value indefinitely. Capital is elastic. The fact that it tightens in a crisis is not the cause of the crisis: it is arguably the first sign of the crisis. The hard truth was not particularly revolutionary even in 1848 when the Communist Manifesto said that the way out of crises requires the destruction of (real) capital, (not just overstretched capital) until accumulation can start again on a lower capital base. So while the governments of the world busy themselves with nationalizing and globalizing debt, they should not be blamed that this cannot stop the stock exchanges panicking. The stock exchanges *should* be panicking, destroying 10-20% of the total value of real capital that they expect to be able to produce profits! There needs to be a real bonfire of the vanities, as theatrical as possible, provided it is also real. And with as few working people as possible caught up in the conflagration. Chris Burford _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
