real utopias

Andrew Kliman of the Marxist-Humanist initiative criticises the arguments of David Graeber, which have been widely influential within the US Occupy movement.

WRITTEN IN THE AFTERMATH of the 2008 banking crash and published in 2012, Andrew Kliman’s The Failure of Capitalist Production adds to the extensive literature on American decline.[1] Kliman identifies the way that profits have tended to fall relative to investments since the 1970s and also the diminishing rate of investment itself (the latter, he says, a consequence of the former)—a period of underaccumulation over the period from the mid-seventies to the present day, around 40 years, or longer than most people have been alive. Claiming to ground his argument in Marx’s theory of capital, Kliman says that “the persistent fall in the rate of profit produced a persistent fall in the rate of capital accumulation” (p 74).

One of the biggest controversies among labor theorists when it come to calculating the rate of profit is whether the profit rate should be calculated based on the original amount of capital laid out by the capitalists minus depreciation or the current cost of replacing this capital. For example, assume I bought a widget machine for 100 dollars last year. Assume also that since I bought this machine, the price of widget machines fell from 100 dollars to fifty dollars. When I calculate my profit do I do this based on my original investment of 100 dollars or on the basis of the current market price of fifty dollars?

There could not be a sharper analytical difference between Andrew Kliman and I on how we understand the trajectory of U.S. capital and U.S. labour over the quarter century leading to the Great Financial Crisis. He sees it as a period of “secular stagnation” – i.e. protracted low growth – while I argue, along with my co-author Leo Panitch, that it has been one of the most dynamic eras for capital in American history.[1] He views the alleged stagnation of that period as rooted in a profitability crisis that was temporarily masked by a credit bubble, which allowed the U.S. economy to limp on until it burst. We argue that corporate profits have in general not been squeezed and that the role of finance in creating the conditions for the crisis went far beyond advancing credit. He sees labour as largely holding its own over this period; we understand labour as having suffered a most profound defeat.

There could not be a sharper analytical difference between Andrew Kliman and I on how we understand the trajectory of US capital and US labour over the quarter century leading to the Great Financial Crisis. He sees it as a period of ‘secular stagnation’—i.e. protracted low growth—while I argue, along with my co-author Leo Panitch, that it has been one of the most dynamic eras for capital in American history.[1] He views the alleged stagnation of that period as rooted in a profitability crisis that was temporarily masked by a credit bubble, which allowed the US economy to limp on until it burst. We argue that corporate profits have in general not been squeezed and that the role of finance in creating the conditions for the crisis went far beyond advancing credit. He sees labour as largely holding its own over this period; we understand labour as having suffered a most profound defeat.