IWG online meeting on state capitalism in the USSR.
DATE
April 22nd, 7 PM EST
WHERE
Online
CONTACT INFO
IG: @iwg.official | Twitter: @IWGOfficial | FB: @iwgusa | Email: us@leftcom.org
Could I please start up a discussion on economics and crises theory again. Very slowly over a long period of time, and through discussions on the ICC forum too, I am reevaluting my own views of crises theory and trying to relate them to the real world. I think this is actually a good point to be doing so because with now have a period of a century during which capitalism continues to develop in most surprising ways yet our political current has recognized that a significant change took place at that point and calls it obsolete or decadent and looks to the emergence of communism out of a wc revolution against it.
Ive said before that for me decadence is an important concept and whilst I know the ICT/CWO express things differently I also know the content of what we say and mean is very similar.
Both Luxemburg and Lenin talked of the start of the final phase of capitalism as did Grossman and Mattick in their own ways. Their theories are insightful but incomplete or incorrect in the sense that we have far more experience of this final phase than they had.
I recently read some of Pikettys work and your review of it and came across the statistics he used on world gdp growth.
In conjunction with this, I would like to raise again the issue of the growth of world population in the last century and question its significance for economic theory. I have never been able to quite grasp what Marx meant with regard to explaining population control and growth and relating to needs of capitalist expansion. Although I note the Luxemburg explaining labour supply as one element of her theory of capitalism’s dependance on pre-cap markets for accumulation and growth
Both the population and GDP (and please clarify if you have different statistics) have grown significantly during the last half of the 20th Century. The world gdp levels the figures are 1820 - $1.2 Trillion; 1900 - $3.42 tr; 2000 - $63.1 tr. I think this is still a significant set figures in that growth rate in 20th century is very much higher than in the 19th. Its not what i would have expected because growth in the 19th was from a much smaller base. Also world population appears to have more than doubled since the 1960s and approx 5x since 1900, far more than was happening previously.
I am interesting therefore to understand how these statistics can be explained from the FROP perspective because a simplistic interpretation would argue that as the ROP falls, capitalism experience increasing crisis and growth is eventually restricted. Clearly these levels of growth do not square with any theory that puts accumulation dependent on non-capitalist markets but your website uses statistics by E Maito and these confirm a generally tendency for the ROP to fall over the last century apart from the period of post war reconstruction. How would you explain the process of tendency and countertendency of the ROP leading to such levels of growth in gdp and population?
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IWG online meeting on state capitalism in the USSR.
DATE
April 22nd, 7 PM EST
WHERE
Online
CONTACT INFO
IG: @iwg.official | Twitter: @IWGOfficial | FB: @iwgusa | Email: us@leftcom.org
IWG online meeting on state capitalism in the USSR.
DATE
April 22nd, 7 PM EST
WHERE
Online
CONTACT INFO
IG: @iwg.official | Twitter: @IWGOfficial | FB: @iwgusa | Email: us@leftcom.org
March 2024
Mutiny is the bulletin of Klasbatalo. Mutinerie est le bulletin de Klasbatalo.
January 2024
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Link
Link
Without going back to look at everything that is written on this (perhaps other, more methodical, comrades will be doing it but that would mean you will probably have to wait for a response) I would just offer these few initial thoughts.
Sorry, but what do the
Sorry, but what do the letters FROP stand for ?
Falling rate of profit.
Falling rate of profit.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Once capitalism has created
Once capitalism has created the material base from which socialism can be constructed, its further existance is an obstacle to that potential higher form,
This does not mean it cannot continue to generate an ever more immense accumulation of commodities, but another process kicks in - the tendential rate in the decline in the use value of commodities.
Ever more useless production geared up to satisfy the pseudo needs of the masses under capitalist conditions of isolation and powerlessness, an abundance of alienated production and consumption for many, if not all.
The penury remains, the essential misery of the proletarian condition, but for many it is no longer a question of survival, of existing, food, shelter, clothing.
It is a question of a pointless alienated experience, working and buying, not able to step off the treadmill of production and consumption that has gone beyond survival.
No doubt a much rawer level of primary poverty exists and spreads, but this is arguably not the prime experience of the proletariat of the advanced metropoles.
it may be the case that revolution does not break out before generalised pauperisation. This seems to be the thrust of the Communist Manifesto.
But are we then discounting the possibility of revolution throughout the sixties, seventies, eighties?
A society moulded in the interest of profiteering may not threaten us with death by hunger before we revolt.
Does anyone here have any
Does anyone here have any statistical data that may concretize whether the cost of new investements is decreasing more or less quickly than the rate of profit?
Arkady
Arkady
The best places to look are economic blogs like Michael Roberts or Carchedi (even if we don't agree with their social democratic politics) as they spend time digging this stuff out. Given the level of interest rates I think they answer is fairly obvious but the problem for them is that even at these historically low rates there is little new investment (hence the so-called "productivity problem"), Generating revenue rather than creating new value is where we are at in the crisis.