Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Best Show In Town For The Money

http://www.shorpy.com/node/9413

"If our politicians and economists et al were honest with us, in Japan and elsewhere, they would acknowledge that if we look at the rise in debt numbers since about 1980 (pick a date), there’s no escaping the notion that debt has risen faster than economic growth. That means we have borrowed our way into alleged growth for decades now. And the only forward we see, when looking at that, is to borrow more, get deeper into debt, because we feel we need the growth we haven’t actually seen other than in PR driven reports, so much we’re willing to risk our own future well being to achieve it? How does that make you feel smart? What is it about it that makes you feel better?"
http://www.theautomaticearth.com/debt-rattle-jun-19-2014-growth-when-we-dont-need-it/

It is the unassailable merit of The Automatic Earth that day in and day out they focus on the stranglehold of systemic debt and the delusional corollary of economic growth. What they fail to do is uncover the necessity behind the ideology and political-economic maneuvering which they regard as a baffling blindness by the world's elite.

M-C-M', the general formula of capital, is not a suggestion and it is certainly not a simple fairy tale to intentionally dazzle the electorate; it is the law. Capitalism doesn't hold its preeminent role in the conversations of power because of its efficiency in allocating resources or because it best assures the comfort of the world's ruling classes but because it grows. Growth is not only a necessity for capitalism it is the religion through which the bourgeoisie has organized its political ascension. Steady state societies have historically managed to maintain ruling classes in power but the world that we live in has long relied on growth to rally the political support of those whose situation otherwise shares little with their rulers.

Crises have been essential to this growth and it is here that TAE will often lead us astray by insisting that the world's central bankers are aggravating the situation by preventing the credit crisis which would and should resolve the pickle of unredeemable credit.  Their advocacy of an honest accounting of the institutions which continue to benefit from the consensus of dishonesty fails to recognize the degree to which capital has moved beyond such calls to reason.

Why has the credit system grown into the creature of science fiction which we confront today? All credit is capital and, as such, will claim as its birthright its rightful share of surplus labor; something it can only do through the production of further commodities, M-C-M'. It should be clear to all that we seem to be unable to escape, of late, a situation of overproduction. Ours has become, if anything, a world of overproduction and has been for some time (pick a date). The solutions to overproduction to which Capitalism has traditionally resorted have never been so out of reach. The globe is already incorporated, however imperfectly, and war shows only a negative return on investment. The limits on the exploitation of the natural world become tighter every day. And the limits on the exploitation of working humanity, though less obvious to their exploiters, are surely there. Preparations for intensified class struggle on the part of the rulers are increasingly frantic even though the workers appear to be all but unarmed.

In this situation we should realize that the strategy unfolding every day in our financial press and chronicled in TAE is not folly but desperation. While it respects standard accounting practices to pull back the curtain on what they call the “Debt Rattle” it is, and it is known to be, political suicide for the old regime. It would be the calling of an Estates-General whose delegates could in no way be relied upon to endorse the standing relations of production. Capital has no choice because it has no solution. Growth as it has been known for the last five centuries is finished. But the truth of the situation and such solutions as humanity may still have at hand will not be found on CNBC but must come from the workers of the world.

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