{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","uuid":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","normalized_title":"zombiecapitalismglobalcrisisandtherelevanceofmarx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","isbns":["9781608461042"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":426,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Zombie%20Capitalism%20Global%20Crisis%20and%20the%20Relevance%20of%20Marx","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/search"},"page":{"printed_page":118,"pdf_page":118,"physical_index":118,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"625e84322ad6fefb3d51425b981aa96609224f2e0b94484711149a5b9f734a6d"},"chapter":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","content":"of the military did this. But it operated as a constraint on the economy as a whole. If the ratio of total national surplus value to total investment in the military-industrial machine fell, this weakened the ability of the national state capitalism to sustain itself in warfare with its rivals. The decline in the rate of profit could not lead to economic slump, since the war machine would go on growing as long as there was any remaining mass of surplus value to be used up, however small. But it could contribute to military defeat.\n\nThe same capitalist logic could be seen as operating in the states where new bureaucracies emerged to take control of the means of production (the USSR from the late 1920s onwards,91 Eastern Europe and China after World War Two, various former colonial states in the late 1950s and 1960s). Although they called themselves \"socialist\" their economic dynamic was dependent on their inter-relations with the wider capitalist world. If they traded with the capitalist countries beyond their borders, they were drawn into the logic of commodity production-and the requirement to remain competitive in markets by undertaking accumulation in an essentially capitalist way. But even if they tried to adopt an autarchic policy of cutting themselves off economically, they could not avoid having to defend themselves against predatory foreign imperialisms. In either case, they were subject to the logic of capitalism as a world system in the 20th century in the way Bukharin had described in the early 1920s. And those who ruled these societies were as much \"personifications\" of accumulation as were the private capitalists of Marx's time, driven into historic opposition to the wage labourers who toiled on the means of production. They were, in other words, members of a capitalist class, even if it was a class which collectively rather than individually carried through exploitation and accumulation.\n\nThe state seemed, on the face of it, a great island of planningat one time even half a continent of planning-within a world of market relations. But so long as states competed to expand the forces of production within them more rapidly than each other, the planning was, like the islands of planning within the individual capitalist enterprise of Marx's time, simply planning to keep labour productivity abreast with the labour productivity prevailing on a world scale. The law of value imposed itself through such competition on all the units in the world system. Those running whole states, particular state sectors or individual enterprises were alike subject to pressure to reduce the price paid for every exertion of labour power to its value within the system as whole.\n\n118\n\nUnderstanding the System: Marx and Beyond","previous_page":117,"next_page":119}