Neoprene

Die trotzkistische IBT hat auf ihrer Webseite einen Vortrag mit dem Titel „Causes and Consequences of the Global Economic Crisis“gepostet, den Prof. Murray E.G. Smith am 12.11.08 in St. Catharines, Canada gehalten hat. Als PDF ist er dort erhältlich. Im folgenden einige nicht ganz aus dem Zusammenhang gerissenen Zitate:

„A broad consensus has emerged that all signs point to the global economy spiraling downward into a very severe, and lengthy, recession — or depression. But sharp disagreements exist over both the causes of the crisis and the solution to it.
.“ If one thing is clear in the present situation, it is that the working class can’t be blamed for this crisis. On the contrary, worker productivity is at an all-time high and wages have lagged behind productivity growth for a whole generation. Since the 1970s, labour has lost considerable ground in what has been a pretty one-sided class war. Capital has had its way, and yet, despite that, capital has still found a way to shoot itself in the foot – and rather badly at that.
In my 1994 book, Invisible Leviathan, I pointed out that at the very heart of Marx’s critique of capitalism is the proposition that an immanent contradiction exists between the drive of capitalist firms to increase productivity and the imperative of the capitalist mode of production to measure wealth in terms of labour-time. According to Marx, the sole source of „new value“ (including the profits of the capitalist class) is the living labour expended in capitalist production, and this new value constitutes a definite magnitude that limits prices, profits and wages. Now if Marx was right, and I believe he was, money is the necessary form of appearance of abstract social labour -the „social substance“ of capitalist „value.“ If he was right, money profit results from the exploitation of wage labour in capitalist production – the appropriation of workers‘ surplus labour and its conversion into surplus value. If he was right, it follows that the displacement of living labour from production – through increased investment in labour-saving machinery and technology – must tend to undercut the profitability of the system as a whole, its ability to produce „social surplus value“ in magnitudes large enough to sustain the average rate of profit.
Capitalism enters into crisis not because of declining productivity growth (although this can certainly affect the relative fortunes of competing capitalist firms and even national economies), but because not enough surplus value is being produced and subsequently realized in money-form across an increasingly globalized capitalist economy.
What does all this talk about capitalist „production“ have to do with the current financial crisis? Certainly the most immediate „causes“ of the crisis lie in the frenzied and short-sighted efforts of investment bankers to realize profits through more-or-less speculative transactions in the sphere of exchange – above all, through the sale, slicing up, repackaging and reselling of „toxic“ mortgages.
I want to argue that the ground for these financial bubbles and the associated feeding frenzy was prepared by an economic malaise that extends back to the 1970s. The spectacular rise of fictitious capital (relative to „productive capital“) over the past three decades was not an accident. Rather an adequate account of the long-term „financialization of the economy“ must focus on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as a result of changes in the capitalist process of production.
The current financial crisis is the outcome of a decades-long effort on the part of the capitalist class, in the U.S. and elsewhere, to arrest and reverse the decline in the average rate of profit that occurred between the 1950s and the 1970s. It is the cumulative and complex result of a series of responses by the capitalist class to an economic malaise that can be traced to the persistent profitability problems of productive capital – the form of capital associated with what is sometimes called „the real economy.“
In response to that crisis, manifested throughout the advanced capitalist world in falling rates of profit as well as in „stagflation“ (high inflation rates combined with slow growth), the capitalist class abandoned the „capital-labour accord“ negotiated in the late 1940s and 1950s. Rendered economically feasible by the high profit rates of the immediate post-war period and prompted by the politico-ideological exigencies of the Cold War (especially the necessity to block the emergence of powerful left-wing forces in Western labour movements), this „class compromise“ delivered rising real wages, low unemployment and expanded social programs for over twenty years. With the advent of the profitability crisis of the 1970s the capitalist class felt compelled to undo much of this. The inflation which fuelled high levels of class struggle in the 1970s was defeated through wage controls and/or high interest rate policies under successive post-Keynesian and monetarist regimes. The recession of the early 1980s and cutbacks in social welfare provision replenished the „reserve army“ of the unemployed and placed downward pressure on real wage growth. Trade liberalization and the turn toward „lean production“ and „flexible labour markets“ further weakened nationally based labour movements. Taken together, these measures – often referred to as „neoliberalism“ -stemmed the fall in the rate of profit in the leading capitalist countries but failed to restore the much higher rates of profit enjoyed by capital in the earlier post-war period.
This was the background to the long ascendancy of the rate of profit in the U.S. financial sector relative to that of manufacturing.
Following the capitalist offensive against labour in the 1970s and early 1980s, crises of overproduction were avoided or attenuated (as in 1991-92 and 2001-02) through an enormous expansion of credit.
What is most striking about the last 30 years is the persistently lack-luster performance of productive capital operating in the „real economy“ – the form of capital that, according to Marx, is the sole source of all „new value“ and thus of all „real wealth“ in capitalist terms. (Surplus value must be produced before it can be shared with financial and commercial capitals.) Since the 1970s the ruling elites have been successful both in massively redistributing wealth in their own favour and in ratcheting up the rate of exploitation of wage labour, but the rate of growth of the world capitalist economy has been declining and there have been numerous indications of long-term malaise.
while leftist critics of capitalism, and even many mainstream economists, have identified the profitability crisis of the 1970s as a vital factor in shaping subsequent economic trends, controversy abounds as to whether Marx’s theory provides a satisfactory explanation of its origins. Does our recent history confirm Marx’s claim that „the real barrier to capitalist production is capital itself”?
For many years, the favored explanation for the profitability crisis among radical political economists was the „wage-push/profit-squeeze“ or „rising strength of labour“ account.
While the labour performed by these workers was „socially necessary“ from the standpoint of capital, it wasn’t directly productive of commodities embodying surplus value – and it therefore constituted „unproductive labour“ in Marx’s terms. This growth of „socially necessary unproductive labour“ was a supplementary cause of the postwar fall in the rate of profit in the advanced capitalist world, but it was by no means the only or even the primary cause.
There is strong evidence, particularly for the U.S. economy, that the growth of real wages for productive workers did not outstrip productivity growth in the post-war period leading up to the profitability crisis of the 1970s. Convincing empirical studies by the Marxist economist Anwar Shaikh have established that the fall in the average rate of profit in the U.S. economy was significantly correlated with an increase in what Marx called the „organic composition of capital“.
The empirical findings of our study lend strong support to the proposition that the profitability crisis of the 1970s in Canada (which paralleled that of the U.S.) resulted from the displacement of living labour from production and its replacement by labour-saving technologies, a process encouraged both by competitive cost-cutting and capital-lab our antagonism.
The overall conclusion emerging from this brief survey is that Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall holds up remarkably well in light of the empirically verifiable performances of the Canadian, US and world economies over the course of the second half of the twentieth century.
It’s hard to see where the U.S. and the other advanced capitalist economies will find the means for renewed profitable growth. The depth of the crisis and massive existing government debt make a „Keynesian fix“ highly improbable. The last time there was a crisis of this magnitude the profit system was only returned to „health“ through the combined effects of a massive devaluation of assets (the Great Depression) and the physical destruction of capital stock during the Second World War. Contrary to liberal opinion, it was the cataclysm of global war, not FDR’s „New Deal,“ that pulled America out of the 1930s depression and created the conditions for the capital accumulation of the post-war era.
The time has come for a revival of Marx’s scientific socialism. The time has come for a class-struggle, socialist program that appeals boldly to working people’s own most fundamental interests. Furthermore, the time has come for a socialist message that declares loudly and clearly that our species can no longer afford an economic system based on class exploitation — a system whose social relations imperiously necessitate the outmoded measurement of wealth in terms of „abstract social labour“ and that must, as a consequence, deny humanity the full benefits of scientific rationality while plunging us recurrently into economic depression and war.
The time has come for this great humanity to say: Enough!“