The Failure of Capitalist Production

Underlying Causes of the Great Recession

By Andrew Kliman

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2012 Andrew Kliman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7453-3239-0

Contents

List of Tables, viii,
List of Figures, ix,
List of Abbreviations, xi,
Acknowledgments, xii,
1 Introduction, 1,
2 Profitability, the Credit System, and the “Destruction of Capital”, 13,
3 Double, Double, Toil and Trouble: Dot-com Boom and Home-price Bubble, 28,
4 The 1970s — Not the 1980s — as Turning Point, 48,
5 Falling Rates of Profit and Accumulation, 74,
6 The Current-cost “Rate of Profit”, 102,
7 Why the Rate of Profit Fell, 123,
8 The Underconsumptionist Alternative, 151,
9 What is to be Undone?, 181,
Notes, 208,
Bibliography, 227,
Index, 234,

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

A tremendous amount has already been written on the financial crisis that erupted in 2007, the Panic of 2008, and the Great Recession to which they led. Many competent and insightful analyses of these events and the factors that triggered them are widely available elsewhere. Do we really need yet one more book on the subject? Probably not. This book therefore focuses more on the underlying conditions that set the stage for the crisis and recession, and less on the proximate causes of these events.

Now, explanations of crises and slumps that appeal to underlying conditions are frequently less than illuminating. To take one key example, the recent financial crisis is often attributed to greed. Yet as a popular saying goes, blaming the crisis on greed is like blaming an airplane crash on gravity. Gravity is always there, but airplanes do not always crash. The underlying conditions that we want to know about are not permanent conditions like gravity, but specific, contingent conditions that made a crash more likely than otherwise, or more likely than usual.

I will therefore not say much about greed, either in general or as it has been shaped by capitalism. Nor will I say much about capitalism as such. I do not believe that capitalism is here to stay in the way that gravity is, but it has been around for hundreds of years, so blaming the crisis on capitalism as such does little to illuminate why a major crisis erupted a few years ago rather than in the 1960s. It is not incorrect to blame the recent crisis on the nature of capitalism — just as it is not incorrect to blame the crisis on greed. The problem is simply that these explanations are not satisfying; they do not tell us what we want to know.

The “failure of capitalist production” in this book’s title is therefore a reference, not to capitalism in general, but to specific and unresolved problems within the capitalist system of value production since the 1970s. I will argue that the economy never fully recovered from the recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. I will put forward an explanation of why it did not. I will argue that the persistently frail condition of capitalist production was among the causes of the financial crisis. And, most importantly, I will argue that it set the stage for the Great Recession and “the new normal,” the state of not-quite-recession that we now endure. In light of the frailty of capitalist production, the recession and its consequences were waiting to happen.

Just as more lay behind the Great Depression than the stock market crash and the bubble that preceded it, more lies behind the Great Recession and “the new normal” than the financial crisis and home-price bubble of the 2000s. As Paul Krugman and Robin Wells (2010) noted in an essay published 15 months after the recession officially ended in the U.S.:

… [there] hasn’t been much of a recovery. If the fundamental problem lay with a crisis of confidence in the banking system, why hasn’t a restoration of banking confidence brought a return to strong economic growth? The likely answer is that banks were only part of the problem.

There is also reason to doubt that the financial crisis by itself — in the absence of longer-term conditions that reduced the economy’s ability to withstand shocks — would have triggered such a severe recession. The actual declines in production, employment, and income that took place, large as they were, are not true measures of the U.S. economy’s inability to absorb the shock of the financial crisis. The true measures are the declines that would have taken place if the Treasury had not borrowed madly to prop up the economy. In the first two years that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers, it borrowed an additional $3.9 trillion, which caused its total indebtedness to rise by more than 40 percent. The additional debt was equal to 13.5 percent of the $28.6 trillion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that was produced during these two years. Yet despite the enormous increase in debt and the additional spending and tax cuts financed by means of it, real GDP at the end of the two years remained less than at the pre-recession peak. In contrast, the Treasury’s debt declined in the two years between mid-1929 and mid-1931, and by mid-1932 it was still only 15 percent greater than in mid-1929. It is likely that the latest recession would have been almost as bad as the Great Depression, maybe even worse, if the government had refrained from running up the public debt.

This book focuses on the United States, partly because much of it consists of a detailed analysis of data. The data that are available for other countries’ economies are not as complete and often not as reliable as data for the U.S. economy. The other reason why I focus on the U.S. is that it was the epicenter of the latest crisis. It cannot be automatically assumed that the analysis of the U.S. case applies to other countries. But since the U.S. was the epicenter — since, in other words, the crisis erupted elsewhere because it first erupted in the U.S. and then spread — the relative lack of discussion of other economies does not reduce the adequacy of this book’s analysis of the long-term economic difficulties underlying the crisis and slump.

MAIN THESIS

The rate of profit — that is, profit as a percentage of the amount of money invested — has a persistent tendency to fall. However, this tendency is reversed by what John Fullarton, Karl Marx, and others have called the “destruction of capital” — losses caused by declining values of financial and physical capital assets or the destruction of the physical assets themselves. Paradoxically, these processes also restore profitability and thereby set the stage for a new boom, such as the boom that followed the Great Depression and World War II.

During the global economic slumps of the mid-1970s and early 1980s, however, much less capital value was destroyed than had been destroyed during the Depression and the following World War. The difference is largely a consequence of economic policy. The amount of capital value that was destroyed during the Depression was far greater than advocates of laissez-faire policies had expected, and the persistence of severely depressed conditions led to significant radicalization of working people. Policymakers have not wanted this to happen again, so they now intervene with monetary and fiscal policies in order to prevent the full-scale destruction of capital value. This explains why subsequent downturns in the economy have not been nearly as severe as the Depression. But since so much less capital value was destroyed during the 1970s and early 1980s than was destroyed in the 1930s and early 1940s, the decline in the rate of profit was not reversed. And because it was not reversed, profitability remained at too low a level to sustain a new boom.

The chain of causation is easy to understand. The generation of profit is what makes possible the investment of profit. So, not surprisingly, the relative lack of profit led to a persistent decline in the rate of capital accumulation (new investment in productive assets as a percentage of the existing volume of capital). Sluggish investment has, in turn, resulted in sluggish growth of output and income.

All this led to ever more serious debt problems. Sluggish income growth made it more difficult for people to repay their debts. The decline in the rate of profit, together with reductions in corporate income tax rates that served to prop up corporations’ after-tax rate of profit, led to greatly reduced tax revenue and mounting government budget deficits and debt. And the government has repeatedly attempted to manage the relative stagnation of the economy by pursuing policies that encourage excessive expansion of debt. These policies have artificially boosted profitability and economic growth, but in an unsustainable manner that has repeatedly led to burst bubbles and debt crises. The latest crisis was the most serious and acute of these.

* * *

Although the financial crisis is over, and the recession officially ended two years ago, the debt problems persist — within the European Union, they are now critical — as do massive unemployment and the severe slump in home prices. These problems seem to be the main factors that have kept the U.S. economy from growing rapidly since the end of the recession. For a long time, Americans were willing to increase their borrowing and reduce their saving, since they believed that increases in the prices of their houses and shares of stock were an adequate substitute for real cash savings. But those increases have vanished, and many people are worried about whether they will hold on to their jobs and homes, so they have begun to borrow less and save more. And because of continuing debt, unemployment, and housing-sector problems — and probably because of concerns that they will suffer additional losses on existing assets and ultimately have to report losses that they have not yet “recognized” — lenders are less willing to lend. The low level of borrowing/lending has caused spending and economic growth to be sluggish.

I certainly do not advocate full-scale destruction of capital value — or any other policies intended to make capitalism work better; it is not a system I favor. Yet the destruction of capital value would indeed be a solution to the systemic problems I have outlined — unless it led to revolution or the collapse of the system. A massive wave of business and personal bankruptcies, bank failures, and write-downs of losses would solve the debt overhang. New owners could take over businesses without assuming their debts and purchase them at fire-sale prices. This would raise the potential rate of profit, and it would therefore set the stage for a new boom. If this does not happen, I believe that the economy will continue to be relatively stagnant and prone to crisis.

THE CONVENTIONAL LEFT ACCOUNT

This is not a book that I set out to write. At the start of 2009, I began the empirical research that eventually became the core of the book, but at the time I had a different, and very limited, objective in mind. However, I soon discovered things that impelled me to dig deeper and widen the scope of my research.

To understand the significance of what I gradually learned, one needs to be familiar with the conventional wisdom on the left regarding recent U.S. economic history and its relationship to the recent crisis and recession. What follows is a brief summary of the conventional account. (Later in the book, I will quote various authors and provide citations.)

According to conventional wisdom, the rate of profit fell from the start of the post-World War II boom through the downturns of the 1970s and early 1980s. But by that time, economic policy had become “neoliberal” (free-market), and this led to increased exploitation of workers. Consequently, U.S. workers are not being paid more, in real (inflation-adjusted) terms, than they were paid decades ago, and their share of income has fallen. The increase in exploitation led to a significant rebound in the rate of profit. Normally, this would have caused the rate of accumulation to rise as well, but this time it did not.

The conventional account blames the “financialization” of the economy for the failure of the rate of accumulation to rebound. It holds that financialization, another component of neoliberalism, has induced companies to invest a larger share of their profits in financial instruments, and a smaller share in the productive capital assets (factories, machinery, and so on) that make the “real” economy grow. As a result, economic growth has been weaker during the last several decades than it was in the first few decades that followed World War II, and this factor, along with additional borrowing that enabled working people to maintain their standard of living despite the drop in their share of income, has led to long-term debt problems. These debt problems, and other phenomena that also stem from financialization, are said to be the underlying causes of the latest economic crisis and slump.

This was not an interpretation of recent economic history that I found particularly appealing, and I knew that proponents of the conventional wisdom mis-measure the rate of profit. But I had no reason to believe that their measures were overstating the rise in profitability instead of understating it. Nor did I doubt that their other empirical claims were based on fact. Yet in the course of my research, I found that:

• U.S. corporations’ rate of profit did not recover in a sustained manner after the early 1980s. Their before-tax rate of profit has been trendless since the early 1980s and a rate of profit based on a broader concept of profit, more akin to what Marx meant by “surplus-value,” continued to decline.

• Neoliberalism and financialization have not caused U.S. corporations to invest a smaller share of their profit in production. Between 1981 and 2001, they devoted a larger share of their profit to productive investment than they did between 1947 and 1980 (and the post-2001 drop in this share is a statistical fluke). What accounts for the decline in the rate of accumulation is instead the decline in the rate of profit.

• U.S. workers are not being paid less in real terms than they were paid decades ago. Their real pay has risen. And their share of the nation’s income has not fallen. It is higher now than it was in 1960, and it has been stable since 1970.

These findings do no damage to the claim that a long-term buildup of debt is an underlying cause of the recent crisis and subsequent problems. However, all of the other causal claims in the conventional leftist account fall to the ground.

The conventional wisdom implies that the latest economic crisis was an irreducibly financial one. Of course, a financial crisis triggered the recession, and phenomena specific to the financial sector (excessive leverage, risky mortgage lending, and so on) were among its important causes. But what I mean by “irreducibly financial” is that conventional wisdom on the left holds that the recent crisis and slump are ultimately rooted in the financialization of capitalism and macroeconomic difficulties resulting from financialization. The persistent frailty of capitalist production supposedly has nothing to do with these macroeconomic difficulties. Indeed, on this view, the capitalist system of production has not been frail at all, since the rate of profit, the key measure of its performance, recovered substantially after the early 1980s.

The political implications of this controversy are profound. If the long-term causes of the crisis and recession are irreducibly financial, we can prevent the recurrence of such crises by doing away with neoliberalism and “financialized capitalism.” It is unnecessary to do away with the capitalist system of production — that is, production driven by the aim of ceaselessly expanding “value,” or abstract wealth. Thus, what the crisis has put on the agenda is the need for policies such as financial regulation, activist (“Keynesian”) fiscal and monetary policies, and perhaps financial-sector nationalization, rather than a change in the character of the socioeconomic system.

If, on the other hand, a persistent fall in the rate of profit is an important (albeit indirect) cause of the crisis and recession, as this book argues, then these policy proposals are not solutions. At best, they will delay the next crisis. And artificial government stimulus that produces unsustainable growth threatens to make the next crisis worse when it comes. The economy will remain sluggish unless and until profitability is restored, or the character of the socioeconomic system changes.

HOW THIS BOOK DIFFERS

Quite a few books have put forward different leftist perspectives on the recent crisis and recession. Many of them focus, as have most other books on these topics, on the proximate causes of these events. This book differs from them, as I noted above, in that it focuses on the long-term, underlying conditions that enabled the financial crisis to trigger an especially deep and long recession, and one with persistent after-effects.

Yet a fair number of other books from the left also focus on the underlying causes. Some of them — such as Foster and Magdoff (2009), Harvey (2010), Duménil and Lévy (2011), and McNally (2011) — put forward some version of the conventional leftist account discussed above. And some, like the works by Foster-Magdoff and Harvey, also stress the supposed facts that workers’ share of total income declined and that this led to a lack of demand that was covered over by rising debt. From such a perspective, the crisis appears not to be a crisis of capitalism, but a crisis of a specifically neoliberal and financialized form of capitalism. I do not think the facts are consonant with these views, and I trust that disinterested readers will find, at minimum, that this book’s empirical analyses call such views into question.

(Continues…)Excerpted from The Failure of Capitalist Production by Andrew Kliman. Copyright © 2012 Andrew Kliman. Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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