Crisis Intervention

 

The title of this page is a pun. But also, as Gramsci put it, "the philosophy of praxis ... posits [itself] as an element of the contradiction." So here's my intervention into the ongoing economic crisis.  (Started on Oct. 23, 2008. Still under construction.)

 

 

WRITINGS

 

Theoretical Background

selection 1

selection 2

 

 

On the Current Crisis

 

 

TALKS

 

1.  "Worse than They Want You to Think: A Marxist Analysis of the Economic Crisis," October 21, 2008 at The New SPACE (The New School for Pluralistic Anti-Capitalist Education), New York City.

Publicity for this talk: "In their haste to promote redistributive policies and demonize the greed and corruption of Wall Street--and in their desire to avoid advocating a liberatory alternative to capitalism--liberals and leftists have sought to downplay the severity of the current economic crisis. In contrast, Kliman will argue that the crisis is every bit as serious and acute as the fear-mongering financial analysts and officials at the Treasury and Federal Reserve say it is. If the $800 billion rescue plan does not quickly restore lenders' confidence in the system, the flow of credit may stop, causing the real economy, in the U.S. and abroad, to seize up. Income redistribution, infrastructure investment, financial regulation, and legal protections against foreclosures are not alternatives to the Wall Street bailout. The only alternative is a new, human, socio-economic system.

"Kliman will draw on Karl Marx's value theory in order to explain how the crisis results from the weakness of the U.S. economy since the collapse of the dot-com bubble. He will also draw on Raya Dunayevskaya's theory of state-capitalism in order to explain why supposedly ‘free-market' policymakers and economists are ushering in a new period of statified property and state control of the economy."

 2.  “Roots of the Crisis and Proposed Solutions,” April 14, 2009 talk at Pace University (New York City), panel on “What Lies Behind: Causes and Consequences of the World Economic Crisis."  (I've combined this talk and Talk 3, below, into a single article.  So the link is the same.)

 3.  Talk for "Marx's Capital and the Economic Crisis" panel, Left Forum, April 18, 2009, New York City. (I've combined this talk and Talk 2, above, into a single article.  So the link is the same.)

 

4.  Talk for "State Capitalism and A New New Deal" panel, Left Forum, April 18, 2009, New York City.

5. Talk and PowerPoint presentation on The Failure of Capitalist Production, at Marxism 2012 festival, London, July 9, 2012, London.

 

INTERVIEWS

 

ETHICS

  • Excerpt from Reclaiming Marx's "Capital": A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency.  On why and how Marxist and Sraffian economists perpetuate the myth that Marx's theories of value and economic crisis are internally inconsistent, thereby helping to suppress the reclamation and development of these theories. At this moment of acute crisis, it is imperative to stop this. As we fight to protect people's material well-being, we also need to fight for their opportunity to free their thinking from the dominant ideologies, including those on the left. Demand retractions and reparations from the Marxist and Sraffian economists!

 Showdown at the HM Corral: On Duménil and Lévy’s Cherry Picking of the Data

 

 

LINKS

 

 

COMMENTARY

 

January 21, 2009

The Line’s Been Changed Again

David Laibman, 2004:

“Capitalism is inherently crisis-prone, and its accumulation path does not behave like the steady-state, tranquil models of neoclassical growth theory. It also, however, maintains a certain coherence over time. The homeostatic aspects must be balanced against the transformative, crisis-provoking ones. The term ‘equilibrium’ is subjected to much abuse by the NOMists. It has different meanings, however, and some of them are crucial to the Marxist enterprise. (Marx, of course, described central tendencies and abstract structures underlying complex realities, beginning with value theory and continuing with models of simple and expanded reproduction.)” (“Rhetoric and Substance in Value Theory: An appraisal of the new orthodox Marxism,” In Freeman, Kliman, and Wells (eds.), The New Value Controversy and the Foundations of Economics, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2004.)

David Laibman, 2009:

“We should begin by saying, loud and clear: The Marxist understanding of the inherent instability and progressive unworkability of capitalism has been vindicated!” (“The Onset of Great Depression II: Conceptualising the Crisis,” http://www.workersliberty.org/ story/2009/01/13/marxist-economists-crisis-2nd-round-5-david-laibman-onset-great-depression-ii-conce)

 

 

 

November 1, 2008

Global Economy Never Fully Recovered from Economic Slump of 1970s

In my "Worse than They Want You to Think" talk (see TALK section, above), I said that "the crisis has its roots in the economic slump of the 1970s, from which the global economy never fully recovered-not in the way in which the destruction of capital in and through the Great Depression and World War II led to a post-war boom."

I was asked about this claim in the discussion that followed, and on Bill Weinberg's WBAI radio show (see INTERVIEW section, above).

Here are some figures on worldwide per capita GDP (i.e., Gross Domestic Product per person) that make the point. It always surprises me that they aren't better known. If one knows only one economic fact about the last 60 years, it should be that worldwide per capita GDP growth plummeted with the economic slump of the mid-1970s, and hasn't recovered since. (OK, maybe that's two facts, but they're related.)

 

 

 

per capita GDP growth rate

Years

World Average

World, excluding China

1951

-

1973

2.9%

3.0%

1974

-

2003

1.6%

1.1%

 

 

 

 

 

1951

-

1960

2.8%

2.7%

1961

-

1970

3.0%

3.1%

1971

-

1973

3.1%

3.2%

1974

-

1980

1.4%

1.3%

1981

-

1990

1.3%

1.0%

1991

-

2000

1.6%

1.1%

2001

-

2003

2.5%

1.0%

So we see that GDP per head grew at a pretty constant average annual rate of about 3% per year through 1973. Toward the end of 1973, the global crisis erupted. Since that point, GDP per head has again grown at a pretty constant average annual rate. But that rate of growth is only slightly more than half the rate during the postwar boom, or slightly more than 1/3 the rate during the postwar boom if China, with its authoritarian primitive accumulation (and dubious official economic data), is excluded.

(Technical note: I used Angus Maddison's annual data for worldwide GDP, which span the 1950-2003 period, available at www.ggdc.net/maddison/Historical_Statistics/horizontal-file_03-2007.xls. Maddison is the world's foremost expert on economic growth and its measurement. His GDP figures are measured in 1990 international dollars (Geary-Khamis dollars). Above, the average annual growth rate for each period is the mean of the annual growth rates; the results are almost identical if one estimates a continuous growth rate throughout the period based on the start-of-period and end-of-period figures.)

Drewk