Mike
Roberts's blog "A generation of austerity" on 18 Apr 2012 reports on the soul-searching of the IMF in relation to the possibly counter-productive effects of the massive austerity programmes it has been recommending for Europe and the US. My response was as follows:
Not
to worry. As soon as enough capital has been destroyed one way or another, and
as long as no political economic alternative (ie a non-capitalist workers state)
is created by the leadership of the world's working classes, then the whole
shebang will start moving again, accumulation will gather steam and the current
nightmare will be forgotten. And so on, ad infinitum, until that alternative is
created or we all get engulfed in a tidal wave of toxic flame.
None
of the official explanations blaming it all on money supply, state profligacy,
labour greed, protectionism, the Yellow Peril work now, have ever worked or
will ever work.
I
think our duty as Marxists is not to accompany the puffed-up pompous bourgeois
lemmings over the cliff as their embedded Boswells. If we are to be annalists
of the death agony of capitalism we should at least try to emulate Tacitus.
I'd
rather we did a Preobrazhensky and applied our theory (which works) to
understanding where the present economic situation finds us as a class, and how
best we can use it to put our working class society in place instead of the
bourgeois society which is now falling to pieces before our eyes, and has been doing
so more and more visibly ever since Marx
wrote that capitalism was a thoroughly socialized hybrid economic formation
trapped within the confines of bourgeois relations of production in the
mid-1860s. (Capital, Book III, Ch 27)
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