“The contradiction is social and political, not technical and economic”

I believe it is a mistake to divorce these categories from one another.

On Crises – capitalism does have periodic in built cycles which cause contractions and expansions. This is due to its nature as an anarchic system. These crises get more acute as capitalism develops. Capitalism is still developing imo so the crises dialectically have within them their own solution. The symptons of the crisis are in fact the resolution of the crisis. As capitalism develops to an ever greater degree this negation of the negation becomes harder. These are technical points, so there is an element of Marx which is technical – part of the mechanical make up of capitalism causes periodic crises.

I agree that an attack on the social wage is happening but the point is that this will only make the realisation of the surplus value created that much harder.

This letter is relevant insofar as it addresses finance capital:

Capital Idea (http://cpgb.org.uk/letters.php?issue_id=881)

Having read Ticktin’s article on surplus capital, I should note that he’s not the only Marxist who emphasises surplus capital (and the lack of investment opportunities) over rates of profit (‘The theory of capitalist disintegration’, September 8). David Harvey is another such Marxist.

However, I have also read other material that suggests that the emphasis on finance capital, financialisation, etc à la Hilferding may be quite overrated, to say the least. This also puts a dent on vulgar ‘popular’ discourse on the matter. Here I will mention another form of ‘macro’ capital (like industrial and finance capital, as opposed to the ‘micro’ variable capital, constant capital, money capital, productive capital, commercial capital, etc).

Two Russian Marxists – Michael Prokovsky and your very own comrade, Boris Kagarlitsky – introduce trade capital. The former ignored finance capital, while the latter said in an interview with India’s Frontline that finance capital is merely subordinate to either industrial capital or trade capital at any given period of time. For example, neoliberalism is merely another period whereby it is subordinate to trade capital, and this in turn may explain more accurately tendencies towards export of capital (from classical Marxism on imperialism) and towards import of capital by the most developed capitalist countries.

I’d like to read an elaboration on the subordination of finance capital to one or the other form of ‘macro’ capital (again, industrial versus trade) in a given period, and how this plus surplus capital plays some role in particular crises.

I should clarify, I agree with a lot of your points too, that the capitalism is nowhere near a collapse and that t is in constant crisis and I agree what we are seeing is a struggle over the wage as you explain it.

That the bourgeoisie does not have agency at all? I don’t think so. A view of the world, where there are the exploiting capitalists on one hand side, and the value creating workers on the other, and there is nothing in between, which your last paragraph suggests, is a bit simplistic.

You talk about other resorting to mystical explanations, but your notion of the progressive, universal working class is a bit like too. It’s too generalised to account for real experiences of people.

‘I think Russell’s main struggle is that over agency. Analysis of the current crisis as a problem of the falling of the rate of profit
give agency to capital whereas he is trying to position class struggle at the centre in order to give agency to the working class.’

In fact I’m arguing that the working class *has* agency as it is the only source of value, and capitalism is utterly dependent upon it. Workers have the potential to overcome capitalism entirely … through revolution.

To argue class struggle is the source of the crisis does appear ‘far fetched’ I agree – if you take my argument as meaning workers chose either asset-price inflation or the crisis. But a weak class struggle (which is what gave capital the latitude to pursue this option) is still a class struggle. My point is that we need to see this as weak class struggle (and discuss how to overcome this) and not as a bourgeoisie with ‘agency’.

I woiuld argue that the bourgeoisie does not have agency at all – it creates nothing. It merely turns our agency against us. Who makes the police batons, CCTV cameras and the rest of the panoply of repression ? Who builds the houses used to fuel speculative booms ? This may appear to be just turning your argument upside-down. It is. My point is to view the crisis from the standpoint of the progressive, universal class, not the bourgeoisie. This is the view workers gain through struggle. Without it, we are condemned always to give the capitalists the upper hand. Of course revolutionary potential is one thing, and revolution quite another… but a deterministic structural analysis is not the place to start if a revolution is what you want.

At some point however the credit bubble had to burst, so the dialectics came back to the starting point of the 1970s and 1980s but in aggravated conditions.

They have run out of tricks however. I have never seen Capitalism so determined to just rip off profits today at any cost and so much lacking any mid-term plan of any kind. Not just that, such decadent lack of planning, such hyper-classist emphasis on making the poor pay in exclusivity, has no historical precedent other than the crisis of the Ancien Régime. That is why we can understand almost intuitively that this crisis looms as quite final – or at least very much radical and essential.

Yet it lacks (so far and mostly) the consciousness and organization of the Working Class. But it is developing quite fast, I understand.

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“Only workers – not machines – create value, so profit will decline as the ratio of workers to machines does”…

This is a misunderstanding of what is value: it is not Marxism but Ricardianism. Marx was influenced by Ricardo and was at times confused/-ing about this nature of value but Marx’ value is either use-value (loose equivalent of demand) or exchange-value (price). Never in Marx value is defined as work. In fact value can come from the work of machines or from the work of Nature or all such work can be value-less because there is no demand for it.

In the end all value is use-value and nothing else, and therefore depends only on demand.

This Ricardianist deviation is a total error: one thing is that workers do add value (depending on what they do, in fact) and that among all producing forces they are the only one subject of rights in the Humanistic tradition of which Marxism is a major branch, and another very different thing is that the labour theory of value, which is Ricardian and not Marxist, is correct. The LTV is wrong.

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And finally you also have it wrong claiming that Capitalism can flourish in generalized social misery and collapse. We must not forget that all the power of the bourgeois class comes from their ability to organize the Working Class (economically but also socio-politically) and, as any ruling class, they are expected to deliver (salaries, working conditions in the job, but social content and stability in the socio-political sphere). While early or colonial capitalism can dwell on generalized exploitation and misery and that is indeed the tendency of Capitalism, in the advanced stage not of Capital only but also of the development of the Working Class (Negri’s social worker) Capitalism is expected to deliver rights, democracy and certain affluence, as it has done for two or three generations more or less.

But it is now unable and unwilling of delivering anymore, lacking any plan for even short-term resolution other than extending and pretending (and hoping it’ll be solved alone). Why it is unable to deliver is clearly related to the senile financialization of Capitalism and also to the globalization which renders the central working classes less valuable… unless they can force their way in the socio-political arena, that is unless they can make a revolution.

And that’s the current situation: on one side the late Capitalist system is extending and pretending without even a slight idea of what to do now other than taxing the poor to pay the rich and promoting neofascism, on the other side the advanced Working Class of the central states is getting more and more conscious, self-conscious and organized. It is indeed a very incipient stage but at this rhythm it should reach revolutionary dimensions by the end of the decade.