Stagnation, not growth, is the norm for mature capitalism
Dec 5
by Systemic Disorder
Economic growth is supposedly the norm, necessitating that an explanation be found for slumps and stagnation. But are these reversed? Is stagnation is the norm with the periods of strong growth requiring explanation?
A two-decade “long depression” occurred after an 1870s bubble inflated by speculation in railroads and construction in North America and Europe burst; the Great Depression lasted more than a decade and ended only because of World War II; and stagnation had been the recent fate of the world’s advanced capitalist countries even before the economic crisis that broke out in 2007 and 2008.
There are no signs of any recovery; on the contrary unemployment remains high across North America and Europe, with consumer and governmental debt rising to unsustainable levels. This state of affairs is the new norm of capitalism, argue John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney in their newly released book, The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China.*
The authors, frequent collaborators in Monthly Review (of which Professor Foster is the editor), marshal an impressive collection of material to present an understanding of the capitalist dynamics that have brought the world to its present state of crisis and why that is the natural outcome of these dynamic forces, examining the crisis from a global perspective.
A structural crisis of capitalism is not the same as a standard “business cycle.” During the Great Depression, the U.S. economy moved through an entire cycle, but the “boom” period of the cycle merely gained back some of the dramatic losses of the early 1930s before the economy began sinking again in 1937. Periods of “epoch-making innovation,” such as that resulting from the steam engine or the automobile, have fueled growth for a time, but no such inventions are on the horizon today.
The reassertion of stagnation as normal state
Professors Foster and McChesney argue that, in the absence of such dramatic innovation, which have not occurred for several decades, stagnation is the expected norm, particularly in “mature” capitalist economies:
“The result was that the economy, despite its ordinary ups and downs, tended to sink into a normal state of long-run slow growth, rather than the robust growth assumed by orthodox economics. In essence, an economy in which decisions on [business] savings and investment are made privately tends to fall into a stagnation trap; existing demand is insufficient to absorb all of the actual and potential savings (or surplus) available, output falls, and there is no automatic mechanism that generates full recovery.” [page 12]
One way of conceptualizing that is to note that U.S. corporations are sitting on at least $2 trillion of cash — there are not enough investment opportunities to put that money, accumulated by a small number of hands, to good use. Investment decreases because demand decreases under the impact of stagnant or declining wages, and financial speculation increases.
The rise in the accumulated surplus leads to general deprivation. The “competitive capitalism” of the 19th century kept over-accumulation at bay through dramatic expansion but also through frequent bankruptcies, the authors write. In the modern era, they argue, there is a chronic buildup of excess capacity and thus stagnation, although regular business cycles continue. A lack of price competition caused by the consolidation of many industries into a small number of major competitors pushes prices higher, aggravating the erosion of living standards.
Price competition is ruinous to oligopolistic corporations, the authors argue, so they indirectly collude to prop up prices. (This requires no formal agreement when serious competitors can counted on one’s fingers.) Specific cases of price competition come in destructive forms, such as outsourcing huge amounts of production to countries with extremely low wages and sweatshop conditions. Firms compete through cutting production costs and by increasing market share through advertising and marketing techniques, rather on on retail pricing….
Read the entire review on Systemic Disorder
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