Thursday, May 04, 2017

From Rahul Banerjee who read Marx in his college days

and who has been an activist working for Bhils in Alirajpur District of Madhya Pradesh for over 30 years in a post on May 2,2017:
Rahul Banerjee Anandaswarup Gadde ji what you have quoted is a rehashed version of what Marx originally said. In simple terms he said that competition between capitalists leads to technological innovation which displaces labour and reduces the portion of the social surplus that goes to it. Thus while technological innovation increases the productivity and so the amount of goods and services coming into the market, the reduction of the share of the social surplus to the working class majority results in them not being able to buy these products and services leading to a collapse of the market and this Marx called the over production crisis of capitalism. At the same time the factory system ensured that the workers could strike work for their demands and take advantage of the economic crisis to organise politically to overthrow capitalism. However, the capitalists are not fools. After the serious over production crises of the 1930s, the capitalist state intervened with huge expenditures in infrastructure building to shore up demand and since then this has been honed very well so that government expenditure, often financed by public debt is now the major source of demand creation in all capitalist economies and this has effectively falsified the logic of capitalist crisis. Moreover, television and other media have been used to create demand out of nothing for useless consumerist goods and also to destroy political class consciousness through inane programming. Technological innovation has ensured that the traditional factory system has been undermined through outsourcing and contractualisation to cut the ground away from underneath the trade unions. 
Later Marxists have come up with the concept of the crisis of production in capitalism resulting from environmental destruction. they say that while capitalism can circumvent the crisis of over production it will find it difficult to overcome the crisis of production as production will become impossible due to exhaustion of non-renewable resources and pollution of the environment including global warming. However, this dire prediction too has proved to be false as capitalism has found ways to continue to produce and find solutions for environmental problems. As technological development makes human labour both physical and intellectual more and more redundant capitalism has now come up with the idea of providing all human beings with a universal basic income so as to shore up demand in the face of huge job losses. 
It is unfortunate that Marxists and leftists still cling to outdated formulations and refuse to see the way in which capitalism has adjusted to the challenges it has faced and continued to thrive.

This was in response to a comment in which I quoted:
A google search shows "Capitalism died the moment the conditions necessary for accumulating capital on the scale required by the enormous amount of wealth available for investment could no longer be assured. It died when the related conditions that are indispensable for selling all of the rapidly growing amount of finished goods likewise evolved out of reach. Today, there are simply not enough profitable investments in the production and distribution of goods, given the gigantic sums seeking such investments; nor are there enough people with the purchasing power to buy the mountain of goods that have already been produced." https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/china_speech.php
May be the solution is in this:
Commentary: Why are children in the same family so different? Non-shared environment three decades later Robert  Plomin 

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