{"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":288,"pdf_page":288,"physical_index":288,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"fe33fc92627a42c8e85a02ef8e77253f58bddff3323aa4c25471fef5fab6b94b"},"chapter":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","content":"In other words, \"instead of spending their past profits\", US businesses were \"now accumulating them as cash\" .29\n\nA low level of investment combined with falling real wages would, in normal circumstances, have resulted in continued recession. What prevented that was precisely the upsurge of lending via the financial system to American consumers, including the recipients of subprime mortgages. It created a demand for the construction and consumer goods industries-and via them for heavy industry and raw materials-that would not otherwise have existed. Recovery from the recession depended on the bubble, what the Italian Marxist Riccardo Bellofiore has aptly called \"privatised Keynesianism\" .30\n\nThe productive capitalists who were the beneficiaries of the operation were not just to be found in the US and Europe, but also across the Pacific in East Asia. Japanese industry, still suffering from the decline in profitability in the early 1 990s, staged some recovery by exporting hi-tech equipment to China which then used it (along with components from the other East Asian states and Germany) to build up ever greater exports to the US. And it was the surpluses on their trade with the United States that Japan, China and the other East Asian economies deposited in the US, which helped finance the bubble and so provided a boost to the whole world economy, including their own part of it.\n\nAs Martin Wolf rightly commented, \"Surplus savings\" created \"a need to generate high levels of offsetting demand\" ,31 and lending to poor people provided it: \"US households must spend more than their incomes. If they fail to do so, the economy will plunge into recession unless something changes elsewhere\";32 \"The Fed could have avoided pursuing what seemed like excessively expansionary monetary policies only if it had been willing to accept a prolonged recession, possibly a slump\" .33 In other words, only the financial bubble stopped recession occurring earlier. The implication is that there was an underlying crisis of the system as a whole, which could not have been resolved simply by regulating financiers.\n\nWolf and others who emphasised the imbalances in the global productive economy did not locate their roots in problems of profitability. To have done so would have required at least half a turn from neoclassical economics to classical political economy, and especially to Marx. But low profitability was, as we have seen, behind the slowdown in productive accumulation in North America, Europe and Japan, while the partially successful attempts to sustain profits at the expense of wages were responsible for the increasing dependence of consumption on debt. It was also the attempts to maintain profitability in the face of an ever greater piling up of fixed capital that led to the holding back of consumption in China-and, as part of doing so, efforts to stop any rise in the international value of the yuan. And the memory of the crises of the 1990s taught the other BRICS and NICs that their own economies' profitability was not high enough to protect them from global instability, leading them, too, to pile up surpluses. In general, it can be said that the different sectors of world capitalism would not have become dependent on the bubble had profit rates returned to the levels of the long boom.\n\n288\n\nThe New Age of Global Instability","previous_page":287,"next_page":289}