|
A - I n f o s
|
|
a multi-lingual news service by, for, and about anarchists
**
News in all languages
Last 40 posts (Homepage)
Last two
weeks' posts
Our
archives of old posts
The last 100 posts, according
to language
Greek_
中文 Chinese_
Castellano_
Catalan_
Deutsch_
Nederlands_
English_
Français_
Italiano_
Polski_
Português_
Russkyi_
Suomi_
Svenska_
Türkçe_
_The.Supplement
The First Few Lines of The Last 10 posts in:
Castellano_
Deutsch_
Nederlands_
English_
Français_
Italiano_
Polski_
Português_
Russkyi_
Suomi_
Svenska_
Türkçe_
First few lines of all posts of last 24 hours |
of past 30 days |
of 2002 |
of 2003 |
of 2004 |
of 2005 |
of 2006 |
of 2007 |
of 2008 |
of 2009 |
of 2010 |
of 2011 |
of 2012 |
of 2013 |
of 2014 |
of 2015 |
of 2016 |
of 2017 |
of 2018 |
of 2019 |
of 2020 |
of 2021 |
of 2022 |
of 2023 |
of 2024
Syndication Of A-Infos - including
RDF - How to Syndicate A-Infos
Subscribe to the a-infos newsgroups
(en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #28: Marx or Keynes? - The management of capitalism is outdated (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Date
Tue, 1 Oct 2024 08:33:16 +0300
The Keynesian left deceives itself by imagining that the crisis of
investment and economic activity stems from the simple greed of capital
holders. It is not enough to move masses of money from tax havens and
stock portfolios to the state and wages to stem this crisis. It is the
capitalist system that must be questioned. ---- After thirty years of
exceptionally strong growth following the Second World War, or because
of it, the economic situation in capitalist economies changed direction
in the mid-1970s. These then saw their decline for many decades. The
radical left attributes this situation to the ideological shift that
took place in the 1980s under the name of "neoliberalism".
According to this left, the ruling class would have set up a vast
financial system whose aim would have been to appropriate collective
wealth to the detriment of productive investment, employment and wages.
The flight of capital to speculation would thus deprive society of its
resources and the state of its room for maneuver, inevitably generating
debt and deficits. In turn, the liberal parties in power would hide the
reality of this stock market coup from public opinion, covering it up
with the persistent denunciation of the social costs. Considered too
high, the latter would deprive employers of the means to carry out their
social role as creators of wealth.
Irremediably condemned to crisis
Marx developed a theory of capitalism that allows us to resolutely
challenge this reading of the facts. The liberal and social democratic
criticisms are both wrong. According to him, capitalism is irremediably
condemned to crises whose intensity must necessarily reach, at certain
stages, unsustainable levels. His analysis makes "wealth" proceed from
"work".
However, contrary to an all too widespread interpretation, it is not a
question of wealth and work in a general sense, but of their properly
capitalist form, as he carefully specifies in the first chapter of
Capital. The author establishes that the capitalist wealth represented
by goods and represented by money depends on the quantity of labor power
spent on their production.
This type of wealth grows when this type of work grows at the same time.
The work in question here is abstract labor reduced to a simple
quantitative expenditure of muscular, nervous and cerebral force, in
contrast to concrete, qualitative labor, which refers to technical
skills. This quantification by "time" of abstract labor is the objective
element of the commensurability of goods and thus establishes their
character of exchangeability on the market.
Now, each individual capitalist strives to reduce the quantity of labor
devoted to the production of his own goods in order to improve his
position with respect to competition. One can, however, imagine what
would happen to value and money if all production were completely
automated: the result would be a world in which the socializing function
of trade would no longer have a role. However, in the current
technological context, the overall increase in labor has become
insufficient. For their part, emerging economies, whose production is
based on lower-level technical tools than those of advanced economies,
certainly employ more human labor, but on the basis of a precarious wage
system bordering on slavery.
The tendency for the rate of profit to fall, a central aspect of
well-known Marxism, explains the problems posed by the growing
technological substitution of human labor. The extension and deepening
of capitalist relations can slow down this decline. Likewise, the
reduction of wage costs and the lengthening of the working day. Another
outcome is the massive devaluation of capital which, after having caused
the criminal devastation of civilization through great crises and wars,
allows a new cycle to begin.
Failure is only postponed
The situation has become critical again, we were saying. In fact, the
microelectronics revolution that took place between the 1970s and 1980s
has caused the system of value accumulation to fall into inextricable
difficulties. An ever-increasing amount of capital lay unused, which
pushed the capitalist intelligentsia to implement the famous
financialization of the economy. Its function was to drain the savings
that had become available in order to concentrate them and try to
allocate them to more or less promising industrial and commercial
activities. Having learned from previous mistakes in crisis management
and fearing their disastrous social and political consequences,
financial engineering has gone from sophistication to sophistication to
postpone the diagnosis of bankruptcy as long as possible. However, the
expansion of globalization and free trade will not be enough.
In the context of monetary interventions based on the manipulation of
interest rates or the redemption of public and private securities,
credit and debt have thus been able to swell to exaggerated and
unprecedented dimensions, fueling speculative bubbles which in turn fed
the production of goods. The American public debt now exceeds 20,000
billion dollars and that of China represents 250% of its GDP! Growth at
the beginning of this millennium could be stimulated in a totally
artificial way. Therefore, contrary to what the rhetoric of left-wing
parties claims, finance has not been the enemy of a fundamentally
healthy market system, but has instead revealed itself as a providential
crutch, and for this very reason it represents an unequivocal
condemnation of capitalism itself.
Regulationist illusions
The Keynesian left deceives itself by imagining that the crisis of
investment and economic activity derives from the simple greed of
capital holders. It is not enough to move masses of money from tax
havens and portfolios of securities to the State and wages to stem this
crisis. It is the capitalist system that must be questioned. Indeed, it
would be necessary for the expenditure of labor punctually increased due
to these movements to increase further, and so on in a constant manner -
something that the new technical standards of production no longer
allow. So once in power, the left will sooner or later give up on the
resounding promises made the day before. It is only in the situation of
market collapse that state interventionism and the repatriation of
capital will return to the agenda, and this with the consent of the
propertied classes. This will put an end to the period of tax relief
enjoyed by the large groups involved in the trade war. This reregulation
will therefore not constitute a "left" policy, but simple rational
measures to save capitalist production relations. They will not lead to
general well-being, but only to a temporary lesser evil destined for a
certain subsequent degradation. Despite everything, there will always be
people who hail this miserable manifestation as the definitive victory
of reason. Let us remember that the tutelary figures of the reformist
left, Keynes and Roosevelt, are part of the wake of the most unbridled
liberalism.
Necessity of anti-capitalist rupture
Capitalist wealth does not lend itself to "sharing". Being made up of
goods, it proceeds by "exchange" and therefore requires continuous
pressure on wages. The class struggle finds its objective foundation
here. The watchword of sharing "wealth" reformulated in Keynesian terms
as a desire to see capital reinvested in economic activities and
employment has become completely obsolete. The concentration of money in
the hands of a few large groups, as well as its being inflated by the
processes of globalized finance, give the impression that profitable
investment would always be possible and capable of triggering
self-sustaining growth. But this impression is false and we must go
beyond resentment towards the "rich" to instead point the sword of
criticism against capitalism and its fundamental structures
(commodities, abstract labor, money, State, etc.), that is, against the
illusory accommodations of reform policies and against any attitude of
trust in a lasting class compromise to which a part of the protest
movement thinks it can return.
The crisis of capitalism is not the crisis of the established power,
which could also see itself strengthened and find support, if necessary,
in its "left" wing.
Wil (AL Paris North East)- Alternative Libertaire
http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en
- Prev by Date:
(en) Czech, CAS: FOR DEMOCRACY (GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE) IN THE FIRST FALL (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
- Next by Date:
(en) UK, ACG: Stormy Petrel Number 6 is out! (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
A-Infos Information Center