The stock markets are soaring: the Dow is at record levels and the FTSE almost back where it was in 2001 before the blip. Three cheers for the bourgeoisie, they've put everything right again. The crisis is over! Ugh! What crisis?
In the UK the Chancellor of the Exchequer is happy and cracked a smile. He says there's jobs for everyone, and if you want to work hard you can. It's the shirkers and idle buggers who dont like hard work who cause all the trouble. He even says that those who work really hard will be rewarded and will almost be able to earn enough to live on. Almost. In case you cant work it out for yourself, you can do this by taking on a number of part-time jobs. Those who complain about the difficulties involved in juggling the timing of more than two part-time jobs a day, should stop whining and "get on their bikes" as recommended by the late great prime minister Margaret Thatcher, now an Oscar Winning film star. Another government big noise Ian Duncan Smith took the trouble to point out that he can live on £53 a week. So there! You can do this if you stop eating and feeding the kids. You just need initiative like Ian himself, and try and make a personal effort, and stop whinging like lousy poms, and remember the war time spirit and V for Victory. Did Winston Churchill ever complain? Of course he didn't!
It's the idle rich unemployed who cause all the trouble in the UK, living like lords on handouts and the non-stop benefits of the Welfare State. It's this group of spongers and lick-spitlles who are leading those who want to work hard for nothing astray. Well, the Chancellor can tell them their day is over! And they'll have to learn to live in a house with no spare bedroom too. Does the Chancellor have spare bedrooms? Well of course he does. But then he works hard and deserves every penny and every spare room he can get.
In the USA, with the soaring Dow, prospects are now so good that the President can devote all his time to guns and the gun lobby. Gone are the economic woes. Even N.Korea isn't a problem. Now that the good times are back we can blow them out of the water anytime we like. Or just drone them.
Even S.East Asia, that zone of eternal peace, poverty and sunshine, is undergoing a massive outburst of growth and prosperity as the crisis recedes (what crisis was that?) and those who never ever had in their lives two baht or three rupiah to rub together now find they have wow! eight or nine. New buildings jump up like energized mushrooms. And locals who never left the village before, can afford a long weekend in Bali, Singapore or Hua Hin. The prospect of prosperity for ever spreads out like a never ending carpet. Such joy; such happiness. Capitalism has broken open the doors to paradise itself. Or so it seems.
So the recovery is everywhere, and everyone is happy, or so the news programs would have us think. Even Nelson Mandela is getting better again. Even the Queen recovered. Even the bad weather will improve at some point won't it?
So what do the rising markets really indicate. Is capitalism going to recover again for a few years. Can the bourgeoisie really get away with it again? Or is it all a dream that ends in broken shards?
So, what would the British Chancellor make of this?
(from ICC article on Housing)I may be wrong, but I don't know of any time in history when significant numbers of entire nation-states had to be propped up by (more) debt, and promises on future profits, or a more 'unhealthy' capitalism.
The structural crisis of capitalism (apparent since 1968, but building since the recession of 1964 and the fall in the rate of profit), made possible by its transition into decadence, is forcing capital into precarious investment channels (the tremendous growth in the FIRE sector), creating an environment perfect for pump-primed asset bubbles (Savings & Loan, Junk Bonds, dot.com, oil crises, mortgage backed securities-derivatives). It now has to accelerate printing currency and bonds (and swapping them back and forth) to keep the weakest links afloat, or else the whole thing falls apart.
The surface manifestations of 'prosperity' are truly a spectacle- world capital is in a tenuous position, with horrifying potential consequences in every direction.
A friend emailed me:
What is quantative easing I wondered? Is it some fancy new term for the bourgeoisie's propensity for farting and hot air, which is about all that's left that they can do. Apart from being disposed of by the revolutionary proletariat that is. Oh! Happy Day Come Soon!QE is money injected into the economy by central banks. The ICC have an excellent article on the various bailouts (that goes into detail on the numerous uses of quantative easing since the debt crisis).
https://en.internationalism.org/ir/144/economic-crisis
I think you pretty much nailed it, Fred.
The Bank of Japan announced this morning another $1.4 trillion in QE to be injected into its economy over the coming period. This is after the vast amounts injected into this economy - to no avail whatsover - over the last 10 or 12 years. The Japanese stock market has soared and the yen has fallen against other currencies - which is one of the intended consequences. This is an expression of the currency wars, ie, the "competitive devaluations" of each for themself, which are breaking out between the major economies. It also demonstrates the hopeless cleft stick that capitalism is engaged in between austerity and "recovery".
All of this raises, again, the function of debt for capital and its role in decadence; but beyond that, I think mhou's post raises interesting questions of what we mean when we say capitalism is "healthy" or "unhealthy"? What does it mean for captialism to be be "healthy"? A high rate of profit? A high proportion of the economy devoted to productive investment over speculative activities? More to the point, are the categories we use to make these characterizations of health or lack thereof economic or are they moral/political? Is there a certain nostalgia for high Fordism embedded in the notion of neoliberal capital as unhealthy? Unhealthy for who? The bourgeoisie? The proletariat? The system as a whole?
There was an interesting piece on the news today about the American labour force--25 percent of all jobs now pay below the poverty rate, while 33 percent of all jobs pay below $33,000 a year. This paints a very bleak picture for the standard of living of the working class. Its a far cry from the days when an auto worker in Michigan could afford a lake front cottage and a boat on his union salary--but what does it really say about the overall "health" of capital? The bourgeoisie are raking it in, the banks and big corporations continue to make profits. Why does it matter if these profits are made through FIRE rather than producing tangible consumer goods that fulfill "real" needs? What is the economic import of these developments at the level of the system as a whole over and above an attack on the working class's standard of living? What level of analysis do we need to grasp it?
I too would like to see a strong effort at deconstructing what debt means in decadent capitalism (particularly with an eye for contemporary circumstances). Though I do think the ICC's analysis through the International Review have been very helpful on that topic.
Edit: Alf provided this link about decadence and debt
https://en.internationalism.org/ir/141/post-war-boom-part-5
That second paragraph suggests the value-form debates. That's a big can of worms.
The Bank of Japan's QE is 1.4 billion yen, not dollars as I said above. At about one hundred yen to the dollar it's still a tidy number.
(Almost) unbelievably the figure confirmed in The Observer today is 1.4 trillion dollars.
mhou, could you develop this a bit more when you have time?
I'm re-reading Camatte's "Capital & Community", which analyzes (with extensive quotes from Marx's Grundrisse and Results of the Immediate Process of Production) some of those questions; the book is cheap and the online version is in many ways better than the printed text due to missed grammar and syntax mistakes.
p.74
Camatte puts it better than I could (trust me, I deleted what I wrote in this post twice already to get to this point):
"In other words, circulation must in some way contain a productive phase, in the course of which valorization takes place, i.e. the growth of value"
Edit:
Internationalist Perspective have several articles related to the value-form (and associated theories). I think Camatte's point in that last quote is that capitalism is unable to exist by relying on state-capitalism, monetary policies, etc in tandem with an inflated FIRE sector and financialization as a core or growing/very large element of the 'total capital'. This article by IP brings up something related to this- artificial scarcity (expelling proletarians from the value production process at the immediate point of production, a high organic composition of capital, and still have good 'growth' without having to expand value production in the factories and workshops geographically):
http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_54_scarcity.html
The mean-average annual GDP growth rates for both the UK and the US since 2007 don't even make it to 0.5%. Lower even than Japan during the "lost decade".
perhaps that was david stockman?
Sundown in America
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/opinion/sunday/sundown-in-america.html?pagewanted=all
Hi Petey, you could be right.
I don't know why we should be afraid, do you? Stockman goes on to ruminate that the end may be near at hand - sort of. Excellent. I'll drink to that. So three cheers for the collapse. Much more fun than the Death of the Witch!Stockman is pretty close to the Ron/Rand Pauls of the world. He was ridiculed as the "man who cried wolf" one too many times by Fareed Zakaria this morning; Only the wolf had never quite come, the bond markets continue to loan the U.S. state money at historically low rates, etc. One has to wonder why the bourgeois media has developed such an interest in him today? I think originally the left found him an intrigruing figure--a former Reganite, who rejects contemporary Republican orthodoxy. However, what they didn't realize is that he has increasingly gone in for all types of nihlist fringe ideas.