[p2p-research] Can Marxian Economics Explain the Crisis?

[Andy Robinson]

In Negri's 70s stuff, he argues that value is no longer relevant to
capitalism because of the closure of the passage from formal to real
subsumption - capitalism now sets value arbitrarily, by command.  He's
thinking of things such as Baudrillard's 'sign-value' I think, where value
is extracted based on something akin to rent on symbols.  Spivak has made a
similar argument about the global South and the 'expanded form of value' -
pure value extraction does not exist, capitalism coexists with other social
forms.  This makes it very hard to quantify 'real' value production -
capitalists might be making 'profits' which are only partly profits, and are
partly rents, fictional speculative income, extraction of surplus from non-
or quasi-capitalist economies, etc.

As an analysis of the current phase I'd recommend Arrighi's 'Hegemony
Unravelling' articles.  Basically I'd see the current crisis in terms of a
crisis of hegemony or Kondratieff wave transition which is being dragged out
indefinitely through various accounting tricks (use of fictional capital and
speculation, borrowing on the dollar's strength then devaluing, etc).  In
other words, the world never got out of the 70s recession, it just looked
like some countries did because of retrogressive global redistributons, rent
extraction, and speculation.  The crisis has returned periodically as credit
crises  since then.  The Mexican crisis, the Argentine crisis, the Russian
crisis, the big East Asian collapse, the European ERM crisis, the dotcom
bubble, the Enron crisis, and now this big one.  I thought when it started
that this might be the decisive one, but it looks like most places have
pulled it together again for now.  The way out usually comes from the
emergence of a new hegemon or superpower, but this seems to be blocked at
the moment by the way the US is pulling in finance from emerging markets.
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