[A-List] accumulation/financialisation - a query

[Jurriaan Bendien]

Hi Henry,

Thanks for your comment, I haven't the time to reply to it in depth just now 
and I want to think about it some more. The post-war thinking about economic 
development strategy moved basically from value-adding import-substitution 
to export-led development, but both strategies have had highly problematic 
results, suggesting that there's really a lot more that needs to be 
considered for a viable development strategy.

The stagnation or decline of real wages is in large part attributable to 
historic defeats of the labour and trade-union movement from the 1980s, 
which is only slowly beginning to recover - but I didn't mention all that. 
But I agree with you that it's difficult to have or sustain a low-wage, 
high-growth economy (except with very substantial state intervention, in 
particular cases).

I have a lot of respect for Patrick Bond but I'm probably less interested in 
the Marxist tradition these days, bar a few writers, because I don't want to 
remain stuck in a theoretical language of the past. If I could - I lack the 
time for now - I would do far more empirical research to get to better 
generalisations about world trends, and I hope in future to publish some 
more serious journalism.

There are few good books nowadays analysing the "real capitalism" of our 
time more systematically, and past texts are to a large extent out of date. 
Essentially what someone like Grossman did was to assess abstractly the 
interaction of some main factors influencing the rise and fall of the rate & 
mass of profit over time. Ernest Mandel, who was influenced by Grossman 
(though also critical of him) did more or less the same. But I think there's 
much more to social and economic analysis than that, and Marxist discussions 
of money & credit, and of international trade, are often rather weak. Few 
Marxist authors actually propose viable alternative policies which are any 
different from left-social democratic or centre-left policies.

I take the "laws of motion" of capitalist mode of production to refer to its 
the necessary developmental tendencies, but the important thing is to 
verifying empirically how that works out in reality, and not assume too many 
things. I take marketisation in the economic sense to refer to the increased 
mediation of the allocation of resources by the cash nexus, i.e. the 
imposition of the transactional or accounting model on more and more human 
interactions, i.e. "the user pays". Talk about "markets" in general is often 
rather meaningless, whereas if you talk about "trade" then you can at least 
consider who are the beneficiaries and losers in that trade, in what 
proportion. The economic argument in favour of market allocation is 
typically that better cost-economies and more efficient use of resources 
will result, but we always have to ask "costs for whom" and "efficient" in 
what sense...

The main scourge of our epoch though seems to be skepticism, cultural 
pessimism and cynicism about any sustained political program to improve life 
for people, i.e. a general distrust and lack of credibility of economics and 
politics per se, and we're not really helped by mass media which turn good 
investigative journalism into florid, shallow "entertainment".

Jurriaan

25 years and my life is still
trying to get up that great big hill of hope
For a destination
I realized quickly when I knew I should
That the world was made up of this
Brotherhood of man
For whatever that means
And so I cry somethimes when I'm lying in bed
Just to get it all out what's in my head
And I'm, I am feeling a little peculiar
So I wake in the morning and I step outside
And I take deep breath and I get real high
And I scream from the top of my lungs
What's goin' on
And I say hey....
And I say hey what's goin' on
And I say hey....
I said hey what's goin' on
Oooh....
Oooh....
And I try, oh my God do I try
I try all the time
In this institution
And I pray, oh my God do I pray
I pray every single day
For a revolution