Capital's globalization and root causes of barbary's threats, François Chesnais
\chapter{Capital's globalization and root causes of barbary's threats}
\chapterauthor{François CHESNAIS}
Here we are in the era of the globalization of capital. In the coming years, the facts to be recorded in the \emph{Black Book of Capitalism} could be among the most terrifying in its history.
@ -14,7 +16,7 @@ This is where the most anti-working class political forces in OECD countries beg
The anti-working class policies could never have succeeded in their enterprise if the Brejnévian counter-revolution had not previously crushed the Prague Spring and the movement of the Polish proletariat of the same period, if the leaderships of the communist parties of France and Italy in particular had not intervened from 1968 to 1978 to contain and repress the truly democratic potential, and therefore anti-capitalist, the great social movements - workers and students - that marked the decade 1968-1978 in Europe, as well as in the United States and Latin America.
On the other hand, the current victory of capitalism is all the more complete because even among those who fight its effects, there are many people who no longer use the term.
They call it “neo-liberalism” and they have to oppose it only the hope, which I believe chimerical (361), of a return to more humane forms of capitalist society.
They call it “neo-liberalism” and they have to oppose it only the hope, which I believe chimerical\footnote{See the conclusion of Ellen Meiksing Woods' important book, \emph{Democracy against Capitalism}, Cambridge University Press, 1995.}, of a return to more humane forms of capitalist society.
Some would certainly be surprised, if not shocked, to be told that by retreating from the word capitalism, they are giving their support to all those who affirm – on the strength of the overwhelming balance sheet of “real socialism” that the collapse of the USSR has finally revealed – that “the victory of democracy and the market” signals “the end of history” or the “unsurpassable horizon” of variants of political and social organization based on private ownership of the means of production.
The use of the term neo-liberalism is often associated with the idea that it would still be possible to combat the effects of globalized capitalism without attacking its foundations.
This is not the case. A historical period is over. It is not only the one where, on a world scale, there reigned the illusion of a model of society rival to capitalism, socially superior to it, “coexisting peacefully” with it, while being able to counterbalance it militarily if necessary.
@ -23,9 +25,6 @@ In France, the terrain of the great struggles of 1936 and 1945, there have long
Pierre Bourdieu, for whom I also have the greatest respect, is wrong to dismiss the question of capitalism and its overcoming and to focus on neo-liberalism.
But he is far from being the only one on the left to mourn the death of a “civilization of public service” specific to our country, extended at most to a few countries in Europe.
361 See the conclusion of Ellen Meiksing Woods' important book, \emph{Democracy against Capitalism}, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
\section{The topicality of the notion of parasitism}
@ -55,13 +54,12 @@ Today, the big capitalist states have done more than give in to this vertigo.
By putting the “markets” in control, they have put the world economy, that of their own countries as well as that of the entire globe, in the hands of people whose vision of the world is precisely this.
An accumulation corresponding to the priorities of money-capital
\section{An accumulation corresponding to the priorities of money-capital}
In its present configuration, the movement of the world capital system is commanded above all by the reconstitution of powerful and new forms of concentration of money-capital (the
large savings and financial investment funds), as well as through the transfer to the financial markets in central countries of important income distribution functions and essential economic regulations long controlled by States.
Large industrial groups have a leading role, but they are not the ones who control the movement of accumulation as a whole.
This is ordered from the gigantic transfers of value and surplus value made to the benefit of the living silver capital of dividends and interest on loans 362.
This is ordered from the gigantic transfers of value and surplus value made to the benefit of the living silver capital of dividends and interest on loans\footnote{I would like to refer to the second structured and amplified edition of my book, \emph{La Mondialisation du Capital}[The globalization of Capital], Éditions Syros, Paris, 1997.}.
The promotion of the financial sphere to the rank of “autonomous force” on the part of people who know nothing about the “shortened” cycle of capital (A-A') as well as the analysis of the fetish character of finance, has had the function of obscuring the role played by the states themselves in the genesis of “the tyranny of markets”.
It makes it possible to veil the mechanisms through which the financial sphere, before being able to set up closed circuits of internal distribution of purely financial gains and losses, feeds on quite concrete transfers of wealth.
Capital that develops itself in the financial sphere was born - and continues to be born - in the productive sector.
@ -75,7 +73,7 @@ But as long as accumulation is not interrupted by serious crises simultaneously
Two traits inherently characterize money-capital.
The first is the conviction, which it is imbued with, that the funds it invests in the form of assets tradable on the financial markets, that is, it invests financially, have the “natural property” of “producing returns”.
It is the one whose owners Marx once said that for its holders, assets had to produce income (dividends and interest in the first place) “with the same regularity as the pear tree produces pears” (Capital, III, Chapter XXIV).
The second trait, intimately linked to the first, is that of being the bearer of what is called in current jargon a “patrimonial approach” (363) which develops in any holder of financial assets the propensity to maintain a stock of wealth rather than taking risks to increase it.
The second trait, intimately linked to the first, is that of being the bearer of what is called in current jargon a “patrimonial approach”\footnote{See Georges Maarek, \emph{L'économie de l'enlisement : intérêt, change, emploi dans les années quatre-vingt-dix}[The stalemate economy: interest, change, employment in the nineties], Economica, Paris, 1997.} which develops in any holder of financial assets the propensity to maintain a stock of wealth rather than taking risks to increase it.
Regardless of the “speculative” operations to which it may engage, the characteristic of this capital is to be located in places and to have distinct horizons of valorization and very far from where the activities of investment, production and marketing take place (these ensuring the indispensable closure of the cycle of development of productive capital).
Distance is not simply physical; it is ideal.
Lenin rightly speaks of the rentier layer as “people quite isolated from participation in any enterprise.”
@ -89,14 +87,9 @@ But the dividends received as a drain on the profits of industrial groups have b
It is the level and regularity of dividend flows that audit committees are tasked with relentlessly monitoring.
362 I would like to refer to the second structured and amplified edition of my book, \emph{La Mondialisation du Capital}[The globalization of Capital], Éditions Syros, Paris, 1997.
363 See Georges Maarek, \emph{L'économie de l'enlisement : intérêt, change, emploi dans les années quatre-vingt-dix}[The stalemate economy: interest, change, employment in the nineties], Economica, Paris, 1997.
\section{The original features of contemporary rentier money-capital}
The original features of contemporary rentier money-capital
In contemporary times, the unprecedented economic and social power acquired by this capital is inseparable from the place taken by private pension systems (or “pensions”) (364).
In contemporary times, the unprecedented economic and social power acquired by this capital is inseparable from the place taken by private pension systems (or “pensions”)\footnote{See the article I published in \emph{Le Monde Diplomatique}, April 1997.}.
In the most central and financially powerful countries of the world-system of imperialism, they capture large employee savings for the benefit of the financial markets.
The category of capital defined as rentier by Marx, but also later by Keynes (the deep incompatibility of the rentier with an economy oriented towards investment and employment leads him to advocate its disappearance “by euthanasia” in the last chapter of the General Theory) has been qualitatively reinforced today by the formation and growth of these funds.
Already the payment of the pensions of tens of millions of people, corresponding to quite significant fractions of GDP, is taking place by means of common drains on the wealth created, of which the financial markets are the intermediaries.
@ -123,9 +116,6 @@ Yet the essence of Voltaire's tale, Candide, relates to the permanent violation
It is possible, of course, that Western pensions will be paid on the basis of the labor of the Chinese masses.
But for now, all is certainly not well in the world of global capital. And the political risks of globalization are being speciously minimized.”
364 See the article I published in \emph{Le Monde Diplomatique}, April 1997.
\section{Industrial capital in a context of rentier-dominated accumulation}
@ -156,13 +146,11 @@ As a result of the increased concentration and centralization of capital resulti
The emergence of the so-called “network firms” has gone hand in hand with a profound process of “blurring” the boundaries between “profit” and “rent” in the formation of the operating profit of groups, as well as the growing weight of operations that fall under the appropriation of values already created by means of drains on productive activity and the surplus of other enterprises.
The “paradoxical” growth of profits and self-financing capacities of industrial groups, in the midst of the quasi-stagnation of economies, is therefore also based on these mechanisms of capturing the emerging value of monopsony power in addition to those relating to the aggravation of the exploitation of labor by each industrial group taken separately.
But it is based even more centrally on changes in the relationship between capital and labour or wage relations, a key aspect of globalisation born of liberalisation and deregulation (365).
But it is based even more centrally on changes in the relationship between capital and labour or wage relations, a key aspect of globalisation born of liberalisation and deregulation\footnote{See Thomas Couterot's book, \emph{L'entreprise néo-libérale, nouvelle utopie capitaliste ?}[The neoliberal enterprise, new capitalist utopia?], Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 1998.}.
At rates and under conditions that have varied widely across OECD countries — as not all countries have implemented policies to liberalize and deregulate wages and employment conditions as quickly and sharply as the United States and the United Kingdom — industrial groups have taken advantage of rising unemployment and the reconstitution of the “industrial reserve army” to weigh on wages and hiring conditions, as well as exploiting new technologies to impose new labour standards in workshops and offices.
They were able to do so all the more easily as liberalization led to a form of constitution of the industrial reserve army as a “world army”.
Relocations, both in the form of direct investment and international subcontracting, allow industrial groups to draw on the world's reserves of diversely skilled workers, without having to emigrate them to metropolitan areas, but also using them to begin the process of internationally aligning wages with the lowest levels, with a given qualification.
365 See Thomas Couterot's book, \emph{L'entreprise néo-libérale, nouvelle utopie capitaliste ?}[The neoliberal enterprise, new capitalist utopia?], Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 1998.
\section{Countries under imperialist domination within a shrinking system}
@ -181,12 +169,12 @@ But it is actually doing so in the context of a continuous slowdown over the lon
in the context of a situation marked by the presence of indicators reflecting the trend contraction of accumulation rather than its enlargement.
Inspired by the classic distinction of the “Unpublished Chapter of Capital”, we can say that the subordination it imposes is a matter of mechanisms that recall formal submission rather than real submission.
The mechanisms of “siphoning” value trump creation. The choice of indicators to assess a trend is obviously not neutral.
It refers to theoretical and political postulates (366).
It refers to theoretical and political postulates\footnote{See Chapters 1 and 12 of \emph{The Globalization of Capital}, op. cit.}.
If we take the indicator of growth of world product per capita, which is a serious indicator of the state of wealth production before the conditions of its distribution intervened, we see that this annual growth rate was around 4\% between i960 and 1973, then fell to 2.4\% between 1973 and 1980, it is only 1.2\% between 1980 and 1993.
Another indicator that many economists consider crucial is the level of private investment.
However, in the OECD countries, i.e. the richest, the investment curve as well as the savings curve are tilted sharply downwards so that we are at the limit of a situation of enlarged reproduction.
In 1994, the World Trade Organization (the already notorious WTO) published a long statistical series that shows the steady fall, beyond cyclical fluctuations, in the average annual rate of world growth. Over the period 1984-1994, this rate fell to 2 per cent and could be even lower at the turn of the millennium.
The permanent creeping overproduction that turns into open overproduction with each crisis, as is the case today for Korea, Japan and soon Taiwan and China (367), is only one of the most conspicuous manifestations of a regime of accumulation, in which the capitalist system as a whole does not produce enough value, even if it has returned to the exploitation of children on a vast scale, if, everywhere, it constantly increases the degree of exploitation of the workers it employs.
The permanent creeping overproduction that turns into open overproduction with each crisis, as is the case today for Korea, Japan and soon Taiwan and China\footnote{See my article in \emph{Carré Rouge}, n° 7, March 1997 (P.O. Box 125, 75463, Paris Cedex 10).}, is only one of the most conspicuous manifestations of a regime of accumulation, in which the capitalist system as a whole does not produce enough value, even if it has returned to the exploitation of children on a vast scale, if, everywhere, it constantly increases the degree of exploitation of the workers it employs.
Let me insist. The total mass of value created is not based solely on the rate of surplus value, but also on the volume of capital set in motion in production. However, it is declining tendentially.
It is in the context of this tendential contraction of the capitalist system in its centre that we must examine the fate of the countries on the periphery.
@ -209,17 +197,12 @@ But if the former can still be analyzed without recourse to the theory of imperi
Even in a different way, the same is true for the Ruandan genocide. At the end of a meticulous work on Africa, Claude Meillassoux concludes that the law of the population of Malthus is reactivated by capitalism:
“The control of the demography of exploited peoples, by demographic means (birth control, sterilization, etc.) has failed.
A form of control through hunger, disease and death, more effective and cruel, is established under the pretext of “economic rationality” and “structural adjustment”:
the lesson of Malthus has been heard” (368).
the lesson of Malthus has been heard”\footnote{Claude Meillassoux, \emph{L'économie de la vie}[The economy of life], Cahiers Libres, Éditions Page 2, Lausanne, 1997.}.
I will be told that these are typically “leftist” exaggerations. Maybe.
But let no one come and tell us later “that he was not informed”, that he had “not understood”. This time the massive death chambers of capital are public and are shown in the reports, just as it is in full view of the whole world that the Gulag is perpetuated in China.
But there are still few people who are ready to associate these facts with a serious characterization of this capitalism to which we are urgently invited to “adapt” since socialism would be at best a utopia, at worst the announcement of a new totalitarianism.
366 See Chapters 1 and 12 of \emph{The Globalization of Capital}, op. cit.
367 See my article in \emph{Carré Rouge}, n° 7, March 1997 (P.O. Box 125, 75463, Paris Cedex 10).
368 Claude Meillassoux, \emph{L'économie de la vie}[The economy of life], Cahiers Libres, Éditions Page 2, Lausanne, 1997.
\section{To conclude}
@ -236,7 +219,7 @@ one where capitalism had anything to offer humanity. This is the meaning of my p
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