tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post1731884063701261419..comments2024-03-20T01:04:27.846-05:00Comments on Permanent Crisis: What is an Institutional Crisis of Capitalism?Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-14682926187338602013-06-06T14:44:03.463-05:002013-06-06T14:44:03.463-05:00You're right, the destruction of value through...You're right, the destruction of value through war has been one of the great historical reflexes of capitalism, when the system can't grow and recedes into stagnation. In a sense we are "lucky" that Bush and Cheney already tried such an expedient after the dot-com crash in 2001, because they made it almost impossible for the US to go unilaterally to war any time soon. However, one thing to be learned from the Great Depression is that what corporate elites want in a period of stagnation are just pure injections of money into the economy. Check out, for instance, a book called The Road to Plenty (1928), which was highly influential and is generally seen as a precursor to Keynesian economics. It called for the creation of unlimited money - and was co-authored by a guy named Waddill Catchings, a Goldman Sachs partner responsible for some of worst speculation leading to 1929! We all agree this monetary creation is not going to lift the US economy out of stagnation. It merely buys time, leaving the system as it is. Progressive forces need to come up with a better solution, before that time is squandered and the historical reflex kicks in again...Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06093526631127908569noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-52867603136089876032013-06-06T12:15:44.741-05:002013-06-06T12:15:44.741-05:00Thanks for this detailed and very helpful historic...Thanks for this detailed and very helpful historical analysis. <br /><br />"The difficulty lies in separating out the aspirations and achievements of New Deal social democrats from the expansionary drive of Cold War capital accumulation."<br /><br />Absolutely. As you point out, that drive for accumulation was structured as the complex result of both social struggles on the domestic front and of the fact that global war provided the way out of the social and economic crisis of the 30s and 40s. The unimaginably huge destruction of value precipitated by the war created a major part of the conditions for the comparably huge rates of post-war accumulation. Right now, mired as we are in another major crisis of the global capitalist core whose outcome remains uncertain, we have to consider the potential resurrection of geopolitical "fixes" to ongoing stagnation, and the horrendous possibilities those entail, as a distinct possibility for the future. Indeed we already see this beginning to happen in the currency and territory disputes of East Asia. The project of rekindling left internationalism must be seen against this backdrop, as it is only by somehow going international within our own contexts of action - or as Paul puts it, recognizing both the persistence and the obsolescence of the nation form - that we can hedge against the same kind of outcome as that which "resolved" the earlier crisis of liberal capitalism. Jamie https://www.blogger.com/profile/18363083808445009325noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-50499017990673970762013-06-05T10:49:37.268-05:002013-06-05T10:49:37.268-05:00I like this remark. One of the things I want to sh...I like this remark. One of the things I want to show in the next post is that the revolts which erupted in 1968 already express, in fact and not just metaphorically, the internalization on US territory of the inequalities and injustices of the vast neo-imperial system created after WWII. What begins to emerge after that point, and especially after 1989, is a global class structure, corresponding to the realities of a global market that today is articulated in real time. However, left internationalism that can't simultaneously analyze the persistence and the overcoming of the national scale is dead in the water - a problem you can see very painfully in Europe right now. I think there is much more to be said in this debate.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06093526631127908569noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-53352891188458352152013-06-05T09:39:51.149-05:002013-06-05T09:39:51.149-05:00A reestablishment of national unity is definitely ...A reestablishment of national unity is definitely not what is being suggested in the name of 'neo-Fordism.' I think a rather better name for that might be... Fordism. I agree with your criticism of political projects focused at this level and this is my problem with Sunkara and Frase's program for reinvigorating the welfare state.<br /><br />Rather the suggestion is that we have to respond to the decades of neoliberal globalization in an equally international form. I think that understanding the class contradictions in American society is not sufficient. We need to understand the contradictions and inequity of global society. Workers will of course need to begin their fight at the national level, but they can't leave it there, or we won't have a strategy for beating the trump card that capital holds, in other words the ability to move across national boundaries more or less at will.<br /><br />http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/04/if-we-dont-go-global-we-cant-win.html<br /><br />Our response to this crisis can't be a technocratic solution to the economic depression or a flight into a sentimentalized past, rather, it has to be a political attempt to force social contradictions onto a higher—read: international—level, to concretize those contradictions in an institutional/political system, and to find the perspectives and organizational forms that will allow us to eventually overcome them.Deckardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06918939582411126943noreply@blogger.com