No subject

> CB: So, the ultimate, ultimate cause of the crisis is the exploitation  of 
> workers, which impoverishes  and restricts the consumption  of the masses

Except that's not what Fitch says-- that the high rates of exploitation 
impoverished and restricted the consumption of the masses.  And that's not 
what Marx says, and that's not what the concrete history of capitalism, 
capitalist growth, capitalist contraction shows.  First high rates of 
exploitation are not identical with deepening impoverishment and restriction 
of consumption.  As a matter of fact, the high rates of exploitation in 
China are coincident with increasing consumption, and if we are to accept 
the general indicators of human development, significant reductions in 
poverty of large sectors of the population.

Secondly, while Charles sits on his one trick pony on his consumptionist 
calliope,  we ought to understand what capitalism is about-- and that is 
profit, aggrandizement of wage-labor, expropriation of surplus-value.  The 
singular characteristic of capitalism is not that consumption either renews 
or interrupts its cycle, but that consumption does not occur outside, 
separate and apart, the cycle of reproduction-- that consumption is itself 
derived from, determined by, capital's success in its reproduction, in its 
rate of accumulation of profit.

But that, I suppose, has meaning for those who actually read Marx, rather 
than search for a single quote on which to hang the whole of capital.

We've had this discussion how many times?  Each time I ask Charles to trace 
if he would  a cycle of capital, say from the recovery of 2003 to the 
beginning of the downturn in 2007, and plug his one trick pony into it to 
show us how consumption drove both recovery and downturn.  Each time no 
response is provided.  And that not saying anything says it all.