[p2p-research] Capitalism's Crisis, Marx's Shadow--in Monthly Review

[Kevin Carson]

On 5/23/09, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Georgio Bertini, whose bookmarks I've long admired, bookmarked this article
> by a University of Massachusetts professor, Rick Wolff
>
> http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/wolff260908.html

Walden Bello made a similar analysis.  The reindustrialization of
Europe and Japan ca. 1970 ended the grace period for American
capitalism, and the crisis of overaccumulation resumed in good
earnest.  Since then, capital has attempted several successive
expedients to soak up surplus capital:  there was neoliberalism and
the export of capital, then the tech boom, then the real estate boom
and the second wave of suburbanization, along with consumer debt to
remedy the demand shortfall.  The hypertrophied FIRE economy and
securitized debt was the biggest surplus capital sponge of all, and
had the virtue of only pyramiding multiple claims on existing
productive capacity without actually increasing production.
Walden Bello, "A Primer on Wall Street Meltdown," MR Zine, October 3,
2008 <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/bello031008.html>.

More generally, the tendency of monopoly capitalism to generate a
surplus has been the central thesis of the Monthly Review group since
the magazine's founders, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, wrote Monopoly
Capital.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html