When you say Harvey is not an apologist for Capitalism, this is a comment which does not connect with anything I say in my review or in the ensuing one sided debate. A debate all on my side. If you are looking for a label which I was trying to avoid, I can provide an old fashioned one, which would be- revisionist. Someone who claims to stand in the Marxist tradition, but disagrees with Marx on all the fundamentals,but claims to be bringing Marx up to date or correcting his mistakes or logical errors.

Now even if you had read Harvey’s book or taken the trouble to follow the points I have made, I do not think the overall theory or the theoretical detail interest you. All you appear to require is an anti Tory attitude and a slogan-fight austerity. But to be anti Tory or to unfurl a banner against austerity is insufficient. The question is :how do we fight against Capitalism and the symptoms of Capitalist crisis? A Keynesian solution is a Capitalist Solution. It is one of the methods used by the capitalist class and its political representatives to save Capitalism, depending on the balance of forces /circumstances.

In the current international recession/ crisis, both financial stimulus and austerity cuts have been used.The working class pays in one form or another. Some people prefer the lesser Labourite evil,less drastic reductions, in the short term, or a slower application of the Knife. This is because of their left trade union perspective ,or narrow horizon’s.Looking to the capitalist state to intervene will only undermine or prevent ,be a detour away from, a grass roots challenge to the capitalist state. The history of Social Democracy is not a transition or a bridge to socialism or transcending Capitalism. And remember the nostalgia which underlines these political attitudes is the golden age following the second world war. But that boom was based on capital and Capital values destroyed in the Great Depression and the world war. That destruction of capital and capital values has still to run its course. Hence the on going crisis.

Many Marxists think a Keynesian solution could work as a short term fix because they believe capitalism is not actually bankrupt or that capitalism is in a long wave boom etc. This doesn’t mean they don’t think that there is a fundamental need to get rid of capitalism. Harvey talks about the limits of capitalism and how it is essential to move beyond capitalism to a ‘zero growth economy’. Harvey is no capitalist apologist.

Now workers are being attacked all over Europe, your analysis of the situation would say that the Tories are doing the right thing, from the capitalist standpoint. There are others, and I am one of them, who believe Austerity is making the problem far worse and that these drastic reductions in peoples living standards are not inevitable. Fight Austerity!

Your other overconfident assertion is not accurate either. You state that “Harvey’s entire analysis rams home the point that Marxism is about Surplus Value production”. In fact he does not and cannot ram home this point, since he does not accept Marx’s Labour theory of value,the falling rate of profit based on value analysis,or Marx’s theory of capital accumulation.

He follows Paul Sweezy ( The theory of Capitalist development 1942 and Monopoly Capital with Baron 1966) with the concept of surplus or surplus Capital looking for effective demand. This surplus, which is something of an enigma in itself, is not a concept of surplus value, but something rather different. Its all about the surplus absorbsion problem which is why effective demand in the market is the keystone of this view of capitalism.

So we get “the turn to financialisation since 1973 was born of necessity.It offered a way of dealing with surplus absorbsion problems”page 30 And “There has been a serious underlying problem, particularly since the crisis of 1973-82, about how to absorb greater and greater amounts of capital surpluses in the production of goods and services”. page 28 This is why “the solution lies in capitalist consumption”page 110.

This is also why he agrees with Keynes and keynsians that the solution to the great depression and the current great recession is stimulating effective demand. This is a reformist not a revolutionary solution. Remember he agrees with Rosa Luxemburg’s rejection of Marx’s theory of the reproduction of Capital in Capital Vol 2,but thinks she missed the solution-yes his mantra the thing he really does ram home-effective demand. In his, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, he disagrees with Marx on all the fundamentals,but expresses his differences gently with scepticism or doubts about the logic or consistency. A careful reading of Harvey is required.

Neither does Harvey say that capitalism doesn’t need transcending.

Since 1981 a far greater level of productive investment went into computing, an industry which is low on constant capital and high in variable capital. So how come Kliman is claiming a profit crisis based on an higher proportion of constant capital?

Also can you explain why from 1980 to 2007 household debt more than doubled relative to disposable income? If, as Kliman claims, workers share was in fact rising?

There is far more to neo liberalism than ‘financialisation’ (why would this lead to lower productive investment anyway?), neo liberalism is a class project, that includes, tax reductions for the wealthiest, vast inequalities, an extreme capitalist domination of labour, a break with social democratic consensus, deregulation of business, privatisation, and attacks on the public sector,

The current crisis seems structural to me, neo liberalism has exhausted itself. There is nothing inevitable in the demise of capitalism, nothing has changed, we still have to win hearts and minds.

The capitalist solution to depression is surely the destruction of capital value in one form or another.Kliman argues that there was not enough destruction of values in the recession of 1974/5 or 1981/2.So Capitalism never fully recovered. On Andew Kliman’s view there has been RELATIVE stagnation ever since. He follows Marx in arguing that the fall in the rate of profit is not a direct cause of the crisis, but underlies the crisis, expressed in financial and market instability. Low profitability, as Marx explained, can lead to risky financial speculation and easy credit and debt build up,including household debt, and when it cannot be paid back, can trigger depression/ economic crisis.

Financialisation and Neo Liberalism are surely not a new stage or phase of capitalism. According to Kliman, US corporations have invested a larger share of their profit to productive investment between 1981 and 2001, than they did between 1947/80. Andrew Kliman, Alan Freeman and others are in a minority in the way they calculate profit as the rate of return on historical investment, rather than the cost of the current replacement of capital assets. But my complaint about Harvey is that he does not relate or even give references to this debate, so people can be encouraged to follow and understand it. He dogmatically puts the underconsumptionist view of the Monthly Review Tradition. (Baron and Sweezy)

Re debt, I was talking about household debt. If workers share of national income has increased why has their debt levels increased so much?

We would have to agree that if true this flies in the face of actual experience. It could mean 2 things of course, there are now less capitalists in relation to workers now than in 1960 or it could mean that capitalists are more and more paying themsleves management fees that don’t factor into their profits, as G4S infamously have done in relation to the Olympics.
Also, doesn’t this contradict with other stats, such as a huge increase in household debt?

“In a fundamental sense, Value production is indifferent to use value”

Except that Marx says without use value you have no realisation of exchange value. And without realisation the capitalist does not have anything with which to buy the free necessary labour in the next cycle.

It stands to reason to me that one of the ways a crisis within capitalism can occur is if the capital-labour relation becomes so one sided it affects the ability of workers to act as consumers. Surley this is an historically proved fact?