Re: [xmca] Re: déjatel¹ nost¹

"Much of volumes 2 and 3 of Capital are concerned with
crises. This particular crisis is certainly to be
anticipated from his point of view, but after all he died in
1883, so it would be nonsense to talk of him "predicting"
it."

Andy,

Yes, Marx emphasized that crises are endemic to capitalist economy. He
described the ways companies will appeal for government regulation to save
them from the consequences of their own competitive impulses, so the
government "bail out" this week is really nothing new. And he also described
the process of abstraction in capitalism, so the highly abstract character
of these "toxic" products would not have surprised him. He did a tremendous
job of identifying tendencies in this kind of activity (just one of many, as
you note) which continue to this day. My point about prediction was the
narrower one that in Capital Marx didn't anticipate all this merely from an
analysis of *simple* exchange, as I think that Leontiev claims. He looked
back on simple exchange from the vantage point of nineteenth century
capitalism, and reconstructed the course of its history.

Martin
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Received on Wed Oct 1 17:02 PDT 2008