{"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":159,"pdf_page":159,"physical_index":159,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"229f83e3eff33460d657515ae50befdd2b491c9e73a3a5480dd416462387fb4b"},"chapter":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","content":"Control of the economy by a single centralised state bureaucracy with a monopoly of foreign trade meant accumulation could proceed without interruption, as in the militarised state monopoly capitalisms of the West. But the economy could not be isolated completely from the wider world system, any more than those of Germany and Japan could in the late 1930s. Importing machinery for industrialisation from the West depended on export earnings from grain at a time of falling world prices-and that depended on the state seizing the grain from starving peasants, some millions of whom died. Preobrazhensky noted, \"As exporters we [the USSR] are suffering severely from the world crisis\" .63\n\nThere was, however, a relative isolation from the world economy, and this meant the accumulation could proceed as long as there was some surplus value, regardless of the rate of profit at any particular time. This did not, however, overcome economic contradictions. Fulfilling the production plans for heavy industry and armaments invariably involved diverting resources to them from consumer goods industries, whose output fell even as the economy as a whole expanded at great speed. Such an outcome was the opposite of \"planning\" in any real sense of the word. If two of us plan to go from London to Manchester but one of us ends up in Glasgow and the other in Brighton, then our \"plan\" did not guide our action. The same was true of Soviet planning. As in the West competitive accumulation produced a dynamic of growth on the one hand and of chaos, inefficiency and poverty on the other. It also produced a tendency to imperialist expansion beyond national borders, as was shown in 1939 when Stalin divided Eastern Europe with Hitler, taking half of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia-only to find in 1941 that Hitler had set his eyes on seizing and pillaging the USSR for German capitalism.\n\nBalance sheet of a decade\n\nIn the 1930s there had been a widespread feeling among the supporters of capitalism that it was in deep trouble; among its opponents that it was finished. Lewis Corey had written of the \"decline and decay of capitalism\" ,64 John Strachey that \"there can only exist for the capitalist areas of the world an ever more rapid decay\" with \"the permanent contraction of production\" ,65 Preobrazhensky of \"the terminal crisis of the entire capitalist system\" ,66 Leon Trotsky of \"the death agony of capitalism\" .67 Their prophesies did not seem absurd at a time when the supporters of capitalism were tormented by worries as to what had gone wrong with their supposedly infallible system. Yet the desperate turn to state capitalism and massive arms production allowed the system to enter into a new phase of expansion. The question remained: for how long?\n\nThe Great Slump\n\n159","previous_page":158,"next_page":160}