Marx and Engels predicted cyclical crisis of capital, but never predicted
when its outbreak would take place after their death. Neither did Lenin.
Lenin's been dead for a while and did not predict the financial crisis - of
2008, as it "jumped" from big financial houses and accelerated crisis in
the economy. Nor did Lenin predict the scale and scope of the 2008 credit
crisis. Nor did Lenin predict the emergence of a new world wide non-banking
financial architecture. Nor did he predict the political domination of
financial speculation over the world total social capital or for that matter
could see the financial-industrial capital of his era, giving way to a new
form of financial domination, in a world no longer characterized as the direct
colonial relationship.
Feudalism, the direct colonial relation and the ascendency of Fordism
characterized the world Lenin lived in. This is not the world we live in today.
The financial crisis of today plays itself out in a new environment. The
financial houses of today are not the banks of the era of Lenin. On this
issue I trend to generally side with Michael Hudson and Henry C.K. Liu
description of the new non-banking financial regime. What I specifically agree
with
is their description of the new post 1970's world wide financial
architecture.
The "post industrial revolution in the means of production," is "what" is
different today from the era of Lenin. What is qualitatively different is a
new revolution in means of production compelling society to leap to a new
social organization of human labor, based on post industrial means of
production. Computers and advanced robotics are to electro-mechanics means of
production what the steam engine was to horse power and the water wheel or
manufacture. Computerized automation of industrial production has
fundamentally challenged capitalism. The process of development has been
uneven; cause
and effect not immediately revealed; and even now when the transformation
of society is evident everywhere, many serious observers of society dismiss
the seminal importance of computerized production and advanced robotics.
The form of the working class changes with qualitative changes in the
tools, instruments and energy source deployed in the process of production.
What
is NOT new is the property form of the workers called "proletariat." The
working class, employed and unemployed retains its wage labor form of
existence as proletariat, with products retaining their commodity form, even
as
these commodities are pushed towards zero labor. Zero labor implies below
what is required for the workers to reproduce themselves as a class and a
world of permanent intractable overcapacity, rather than "just" cyclical
crisis. I agree with Mr. Liu's unraveling of the impact of revolution in the
means of production and the emergence of permanent overcapacity as a new
environment of crisis of overproduction.
What has changed is the underlying technology regime in society, as these
mew means of production evolve in antagonism with the old technology regime
and the classes corresponding to it. .
WL.
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