MR Zine:The Crisis of Capital: Economy, Ecology, and Empire
Posted by alex_c on January 23rd, 2010
“How is it that we could be facing a crisis of empire, of imperialism, of war, of conflict internationally, we could be facing an environmental crisis on a scale that threatens the whole planet as we know it, and we could be facing at the same time being in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression? And how do we deal with all these problems simultaneously? Is it simply coincidental that all these problems arise at the same time? I think that we have to consider the possibility — in fact for me it’s more than a possibility — that what we are facing is the crisis of capital, the crisis of capitalism.”
-He may not be the most charismatic speaker, but his argument is certainly brilliant.
January 31st, 2010 at 1:39 pm
A very interesting lecture. This is the “monopoly school” take on the U.S. economy. It’s based on Baran and Sweezy’s 1966 book, Monopoly Capital. The argument is that stagnation is the normal state of affairs in monopoly capitalism due to the so-called “tendency of surplus to rise”. Stagnation, however, is punctuated by periods of moderate growth caused by external stimuli such as speculation. This is their famous inversion: Stagnation is the normal state of affairs, so it’s the periods of growth that we have to explain. I don’t subscribe to the theory, but I think JBF points to some important empirical tendencies that have to be account for.