{"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":146,"pdf_page":146,"physical_index":146,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"f4934d8902f55f312bdc5ba135c201baa198762b833cffc57223ad7ae8cf275a"},"chapter":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","content":"Many analyses have argued that investment fulfilled this role. Gordon Brown tells how much recent literature sees \"that the most notable aspect of the 1920s was overinvestment\" .11 A chastened Hansen noted in his analysis of the slump that, although a \"vast sum of \\$138,000,000,000\" of \"investment\" had \"led consumption\" during the 1 920s, only half of that was business investment, and of that only a third was new investment, ie a mere \\$3 billion a year. 12 In other words, beneath the appearance of rapidly expanding investment, the reality was a relatively low level of productive accumulation despite the impetus provided by the new industries. Other analyses, by Simon Kusznets,13 Steindl,14 and Gillman, 15 bear this out.\n\nOnly one, stark, conclusion can be drawn from such figures. The boom could not have taken place if it had only depended on the demand for goods created by productive investment and wages. A third element had to be present to prevent the piling up of unsold goods and recession in the mid-1920s. As Hansen recognised, \"Stimulating and sustaining forces outside business investment and consumption were present . . . with these stimuli removed, business expenditures would have been made on a more restrictive scale, leaving the economy stagnant if not depressed\" <sup>.16</sup>\n\nHansen, as a mainstream economist, even if by now a critical one, saw these forces as being \"non-business capital expenditures (residential building and public construction)\" and \" the growing importance of durable consumer goods financed in large part by a billion dollar per year growth of instalment credit\" and \"rather feckless foreign lending\" .17\n\nA classic Marxist analysis of the slump by Lewis Corey puts the stress on the growth of luxury consumption, unproductive expenditures and credit. The 1920s were a decade in which incomes from dividends and managerial salaries rose several times faster than real wages,18 until \"the bourgeoisie\" (including the non-farm petty bourgeoisie) were responsible for over 40 percent of consumption, according to him. 19 Then there was growing expenditure on advertising and sales drives as firms sought markets for the growing number of goods they were turning out-this expenditure, in the form of incomes for sales personnel in these same industries, could then create a market for some of the goods businesses were trying to sell. A doubling of consumer credit20 enabled the middle class and some layers of workers to buy \"on the never never\" some of the new range of consumer goods, with car sales at a level in 1929 they were not to reach again until 19 5 3. And finally there were upsurges of non-productive speculative investment in real estate and the stock market. Such things could not create fresh new surplus value to solve the problem of profitability (they merely involved funds passing from one capitalist pocket to another). But their byproduct was unproductive expenditure in new building, new managerial salaries and conspicuous consumption, all of which absorbed some of the goods being poured out by industry, encouraging further speculation:\n\n146\n\nCapitalism in the 20th Century","previous_page":145,"next_page":147}