--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9781608461042" library_document_id: "4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe" source_sha256: "46dee6b4497d88f0c925457d635dd321964c6f4b00bbc137e1d31adde30698c7" pdf_physical_page_count: 426 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 350 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe?start=350&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=350&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=340&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=360&limit=10" --- # Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=350 | PRINTED_PAGE=350 Its very restlessness means that it cannot allow those it exploits to remain in any degree of contentment for any great length of time. As the runaway system lurches from boom to slump and tries to boost profits and write off debts in a wild attempt to lurch back again it dashes the very hopes of a secure life that it has encouraged in the past. It insists the mass of the people have to work longer for less, to accept they must lose their jobs because bankers lost their heads, to resign themselves to hardship in old age, to give up their homes to the repo men, to go hungry on peasant plots so as to pay the moneylender and the fertiliser supplier. People will react against this. Some were already doing so as I wrote these words. The last spurt of the mid-1 990s onwards finance-fuelled boom saw spontaneous riots against rising food and energy prices in a score of countries. The first months of its new recession saw protests, riots and strikes against its effects. It could not be otherwise. All such movements can provide people with the conditions for learning for themselves about the potentialities of class struggle against the system. And the interaction of recurrent crises-economic, military, ecological-is repeatedly going to create conditions that breed further discontent even if capitalism does somehow finally emerge from the present crisis intact. It bears repeating again and again that the wealthiest society in human history, the United States, operated over the last three decades before the current crisis broke by pushing down the living standards of those who labour within it. That too was the pattern of Japan from the early 1990s on. They are examples which those who rule over Western Europe have set out to emulate, and any success they have will create similar pressures on those presiding over capital accumulation in the newly industrialising societies of East and South East Asia. That does not necessarily mean there might not be spells in which some parts of the system might seem better than in the recent past to many who live within them. Such was the case in the mid to late 1 980s and the mid to late 1 990s, and it may well happen again. But in the "runaway world" of capitalism in the 21st century they cannot last long, and the crises that bring their sudden end can raise discontent to massive levels. Lenin laid out conditions that he saw as necessary for society to enter a "pre-revolutionary crisis" . Two are going to be fulfilled again and again in this century. The ruling class will not be able continue with things in the old way. And the mass of people will not feel able to put up with things in the old way. These two elements have produced very important social upheavals in the decades since the demise of the long boom-from Iran in 1979 and Poland in 1980-8 1 , through to Russia in 1989-91 , to Indonesia in 1998, to Argentina and then Venezuela and Bolivia in the years after 200 1 . The escalation of crisis in October 2008 led President Sarkozy of France to warn fellow rulers of the danger of "a European 1 968". Whether his warning was right or wrong in the short term, we will see massive social upheaval repeatedly in the decades ahead. But what has so far been lacking has been a third element Lenin focused on, the subjective one: a political current able to win people in their masses to the notion of a reorganisation of society and prepared to take decisive action at key moments in leading people to fight for it. 350 The Runaway System ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=351 | PRINTED_PAGE=351 The absence of such a current is itself a product of objective processes, some of which are described in this book. The last great wave of insurgency against the system in the late 1960s and early 1 970s failed to break through.69 Restructuring of the system through crises disorganised many of the forces involved in that insurgency just as defeat demoralised the left. The demoralisation was made more profound by the way the great majority of those on the left worldwide identified with the societies of the old Eastern bloc, societies which had, in fact, been absorbed into the system's dynamic of competitive accumulation and which suffered more than most from the crisis of the state capitalist phase of the system. It was as if much of the left had to be born afresh when the latest phase of insurgency began to take off with the Chiapas rebellion in Mexico and a wave of public sector strikes in France in 1 995, the demonstrations against capitalist globalisation of 1 999- 2001 and the movement against the Iraq war in 2002-3. But being born afresh also meant having to learn afresh. Typically, activists talked about fighting globalisation or neoliberalism, not capitalism. But the runaway system has itself created the objective conditions for yet another shift. As I write this, the sheer scale of the crisis facing the world system is forcing even those who run the system to talk about capitalism, and having to recognise that Marx had something to say about it long before Keynes. Many of the new generation of activists have begun to study his writings and many of the older generation suddenly find they have an audience to pass what they have learnt on to. Who Can Overcome? 351 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=352 | PRINTED_PAGE=352 That in itself does not guarantee that the subjective element will arise to make sure that the next great revolts against the system are not contained by it. For that to happen, those who study capitalism have to become an integral part of a movement of those who suffer from it. What we can say with certainty is that without such a movement the world by the end of this century is going to be intolerable for the majority of those who live in it. As the young Marx put it, "Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways. The point is to change it." 352 The Runaway System ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=353 | PRINTED_PAGE=353 Notes Introduction 2 Washington Times, 24 October 2008. 1 3 Put together by Engels from manuscripts Marx left in an incomplete state. Chapter One: Marx's Concepts 1 Usually called "horticultural societies" by anthropologists. 2 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book One, Chapter 4, available at http://w.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html; see also David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (Cambridge, 1995), pll. 353 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=354 | PRINTED_PAGE=354 16 Marx, Capital, Volume One. 17 As above, p72. 18 As above, p74. 354 Notes ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=355 | PRINTED_PAGE=355 24 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London, Penguin, 1973). Also available at 25 Marx, Capital, Volume One, p409. 26 So the chapters in Capital on manufacturing and machinery fall within the section of the work entitled "The Production of Relative Surplus Value", Capital, Volume One, pp336-504. Marx, Capital, Volume One, p411. There is a minor ambiguity in Marx's work as to whether the intensification of the labour without any changing of technique amounts to "relative" or "absolute surplus value", since a passage on page 410 seems to imply the latter, and this is how some people read Marx. The point has no wide significance. I prefer the "relative surplus value" option since it is invariably combined with the introduction of machinery which, as Marx points out repeatedly, usually increases rather than diminishes the burden on the worker-and produces a different sort of resistance to that produced by extending the working day. 28 Marx, Capital, Volume One, p410. 29 As above, p411. 3 0 Engels, "Socialism: Scientific and Utopian," in Marx, Engels and Lenin, The Essential Left (London, Unwin Books, 1960), p130. There is sometimes confusion among Marxists about this. Some contend competition cannot be constitutive of capital since Marx's method in Volume One of Capital is to arrive at the general laws of the system by abstracting from the impact of competition over the distribution of surplus value between the different units of the system. Competition then supposedly belongs to the sphere of distribution, not that of production. But the competition is between producing units. It arises from the fact that their interaction with each other is not planned. This then imposes on each the general features of the system Marx analyses in Volume One. Without it there would be no reason for the individual capitals to abide by the law of value, even if some of the necessary efects of competition express themselves in the sphere of distribution. As Marx puts it, "The inner law [of value] enforces itself only through their competition, their mutual pressure upon one another." Hence it is absurd for some theorists to claim that the notion of capital does not include the notion of many competing capitals; the concept of capital presupposes commodity production. It is similar to substituting input-output tables relating particular industries to each other for the competition between capitals and then claiming to have a model of capitalist society, as do the "Ricardian" critics of Marx's theories. 3 1 Marx, Capital, Volume One. 32 "Valorisation" is the French translation of the German term used by Marx, Verwertung. "Valorisation" in French means an expansion in the value of something (eg a company share). But the general English meaning of the word is different, meaning simply "fixing the price or value of a commodity, etc, especially by a centralised organised scheme" (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Third Edition). This usage leads to confusion with the very different concept of "realisation" (ie getting the monetary value of commodities), which is how the term valorization is used in the English translation of the Grundrisse by Martin Nicolaus. All this is confusing for newcomers to Marx's writings-and encourages an academicist tendency to dense, often nearly unintelligible, expositions of Marx's analyses. 33 Marx, Capital, Volume One, p751. 34 As above, p716. 35 This is something David Harvey slips into in his books The New Imperialism (Oxford, 2005) and A Short History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, 2007). 27 Notes 355 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=356 | PRINTED_PAGE=356 356 Notes ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=357 | PRINTED_PAGE=357 22 P Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, ppl 15 and 128. 23 Miguel Angel Garcia, "Karl Marx and the Formation of the Average Rate of Profit'', International Socialism, 2:5 (1979); Anwar Shaikh, "Marx's Theory of Value and the 'Transformation Problem"', in Jesse Schwartz (ed), The Subtle Anatomy of Capitalism (Santa Monica, Goodyear, 1977). 24 This is an argument I accepted and spelt out in my book Explaining the Crisis (London, Bookmarks, 1984), pp160-162. 25 They have formulated what are known as "temporal" interpretations of Marx. 26 For various presentations of this argument, using mathematical examples, see G Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy, pp92-96; A Kliman, Reclaiming Marx's Capital, pp 151-152; Alan Freeman, "Marx without Equilibrium", MPRA Paper no.1207 (2007) available at .de/1207/1/MPRA\_paper\_l207.pdf 27 This interpretation of Marx on this point is known as the "single system interpretation". Some of those who hold to it also accept, like me, the temporal interpretation, with the combination of both being known by the cumbersome (and somewhat offputting) phrase "The Temporal Single System Interpretation" or TSSI. 28 G Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy, pp96-97. 29 Marx, Capital, Volume One, p44. 30 This is essentially the account provided by Bob Rowthorn in Capitalism, Conflict and Inflation (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1980) pp231-249. Except that Rowthorn sees training as taking place mainly via the state and therefore, for him, outside of capitalism. Carchedi sees training as adding to the value of labour power, but does not explain how this transfers into the final product (Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy, pp130-133). Alfredo Saad Filho and P Harvey both strongly reject the interpretation I have put here because "it conflates education and training with the storing of up of labour in machinery and other elements of constant capital"-see Alfredo Saad Filho, The Value of Marx (London, Routledge, 2002), p58. For Harvey, "Skilled labour creates more value in equal periods of time than does unskilled labour because it is physically more productive, and there is no reason to suppose that any determinate relationship exists between this increased physical productiveness and the physical productivity of the extra labour needed to produce the skill"-P Harvey, "The Value Creating Capacity of Skilled Labor in Marxian Economics", Review of Radical Political Economy, 17: 1-2, quoted by A Saad Filho, in The Value of Marx). But what Harvey is assuming is that there is some way of measuring the comparative physical productivities of labour that might be producing quite different products, ie that you can equate the value of commodities by comparing their use values. This leaves him (and A Saad Filho) open to the very objection made by Bohm-Bawerk. 3 1 G Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy, p133. Chapter Three: The Dynamics of the System 1 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (London, 191 1), p339. 2 See L Walras, Elements of Pure Economics, p381 . For Jevons, see Eric Roll, A History of Economic Thought (London, Faber, 1962), p376. 3 Anwar Shaikh, "An Introduction to the History of Crisis Theory", in Bruce Steinberg and others (eds), US Capitalism in Crisis (New York, Union of Radical Political Economics, 1978), p221. Also available at http:/homepage .newschool.edu/-AShaikh/crisis\_theories.pdf 4 Luca Pensieroso, "Real Business Cycle Models of the Great Depression; A Notes 357 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=358 | PRINTED_PAGE=358 358 Notes ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=359 | PRINTED_PAGE=359 Notes 359 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=360&limit=10)