No abstract

No abstract

for the serious efforts they have made to summarize and evaluate my arguments in Global Capitalism in Crisis (GCIC), while exploring the theoretical, political and methodological implications of my analysis of "the decay of the profit system." Dumont and Workman in particular offer particularly appreciative commentaries that deepen and develop my ideas in a number of fruitful ways, while also (alas!) presenting me with few opportunities for disagreement. Fortunately, through his more critical engagement with my book, Castro has created a welcome opening for me to clarify several points and to elaborate on some of the more strictly political arguments in my book, a task that I will undertake toward the end of this contribution. It is disappointing that the fourth review, by J. O. Andersson, fails to rise to the same high standard of intellectual honesty and fair-minded engagement as the other reviews. The sole redeeming feature of the Andersson piece is that its misrepresentations, errors and ideological prejudices draw attention to several central concerns of GCIC that are mentioned only in passing by the other contributors. These concerns include: Marx's law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit; the problem of unproductive labour in contemporary capitalism; the relationship between the financial crisis of 2007-09 and what I refer to as the "historical-structural crisis" of world capitalism; and some of the intellectual and political pathologies afflicting the contemporary reformist left. It is to these issues that I will devote most of my attention in what follows. As I made clear in the book's preface, my purpose in bringing together both new and previously published material in GCIC was not to provide a detailed description or analysis of the events that shaped and triggered the financial crisis of 2007-09. Rather, my aim was to disclose the "essential relations" (to use a phrase favoured by Thom Workman, following Marx) that are the backdrop to a decades-old malaise of the world capitalist economy and to the associated "financialization" process whose phenomenal forms and results have been the almost exclusive concern of mainstream commentators and many leftist intellectuals. These essential relations are precisely the relations of capitalist production/reproduction and the growing contradiction between these social relations and the increasingly sophisticated forces of production that mark contemporary capitalism. In this connection, my goal was to show that Marx's account of the fundamental contradictions and "laws of motion" of the capitalist mode of production is indispensable to an adequate analysis not only of the Great Recession, understood as a conjunctural crisis of global capitalism, but also to an understanding of the historical impasse that humankind now confronts and has confronted (albeit in different ways) for over a century. Politically, this theoretical

The relevance of Marx's theory of value and his 'law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall' to the analysis of the financial crisis of 2007-8 and the ensuing global slump is affirmed. The hypertrophie growth of unproductive constant capital, including the wages of'socially necessary' unproductive labour and tax revenues, is identified as an important manifestation of an historicalstructural crisis of capitalism, alongside the increasing weight of fictitious capital and the proliferation of fictitious profits in the lead-up to the financial crisis. These phenomena have obscured the deepest roots of the global slump in tbe long-term profitability problems of productive capital -that is, in a crisis of surplus-value production. With these considerations taken into account, a better empirical assessment of trends in the composition of capital becomes possible, and with it a more accurate understanding of the impact of the ongoing displacement of living labour from production on the average rate of profit and the future of US and global capitalism.

No abstract