by Michael Roberts
This year’s conference of the International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy (IIPPE)
in Pula, Croatia had the theme of The State of Capitalism and the State
of Political Economy. Most submissions concentrated on the first theme
although the plenary presentations aimed at both.
I was struck by the number of papers (IIPPE 2018 – Abstracts) on
the situation in Brazil, China and Turkey – a sign of the times – but
also by the relative youth of the attendees, particularly from Asia and
the ‘global south’. The familiar faces of the ‘baby boomer’ generation
of Marxist and heterodox economists (my own demographic) were less in
evidence.
Obviously I could not attend all simultaneous sessions so I
concentrated on the macroeconomics of advanced capitalist economies.
Actually my own session was among the first of the conference.
Under
the title of The limits to economic policy management in the era of financialisation, I presented a paper on The limits of fiscal policy (my PP presentation is here (The limits to fiscal policy).
I argued that, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes had
recognised that monetary policy would not work in getting depressed
economies out of a slump, whether monetary policy was ‘conventional’
(changing the interest rate for borrowing) or ‘unconventional’ (central
banks buying financial assets by ‘printing’ money). In the end, Keynes
opted for fiscal stimulus as the only way for governments to get the
capitalist economy going.
In the current Long Depression, now ten years old,
both conventional (zero interest rates)and unconventional (quantitative
easing) monetary policy has again proved to be ineffective. Monetary
easing had instead only restored bank liquidity (saved the banks) and
fuelled a stock and bond market bonanza. The ‘real’ or productive
economy had languished with low real GDP growth, investment and wage
incomes.
Maria Ivanova of Goldsmiths University of London also presented in my session (Ivanova_Quantitative Easing_IJPE_forthcoming)
and she showed clearly that both conventional and unconventional
monetary policies adopted by the US Fed had done little to help growth
or investment and had only led to a new boom in financial assets and a
sharp rise in corporate debt, now likely to be the weak link in the
circulation of capital in the next slump.
Keynesian-style fiscal stimulus was hardly tried in the last ten
years (instead ‘austerity’ in government spending and budgets was
generally the order of the day). Keynesians thus continue to claim that
fiscal spending could have turned things around. Indeed, Paul Krugman
argued just that in the New York Times as the IIPPE conference took place.
But in my paper, I refer to Krugman’s evidence for this and show that
in the past government spending and/or running budget deficits have had
little effect in boosting growth or investment. That’s because, under a
capitalist economy, where 80-90% of all productive investment is by
private corporations producing for profit, it is the level of
profitability of capital that is the decisive factor for growth, not
government spending boosting ‘aggregate demand’. In the last ten years
since the Great Recession, while profits have risen for some large
corporations, average profitability on capital employed has remained low and below pre-crash levels
(see profitability table below based on AMECO data). At the same time,
corporate debt has jumped up as large corporations borrow at near zero
rates to buy their own share (to boost prices) and/or increased payouts
to shareholders.
Government spending on welfare benefits and public services along
with tax cuts to boost ‘consumer demand’ is what most modern Keynesians
assume is the right policy. But it would not solve the problem (and
Keynes thought so too in the 1940s). Indeed, what is required is a
massive shift to the ‘socialisation of investment’, to use Keynes’ term,
i.e. the government should resume responsibility for the bulk of
investment and its direction. During the 1940s, Keynes actually
advocated that up to 75% of all investment in an economy should be state
investment, reducing the role of the capitalist sector to the minimum
(see Kregel, J. A. (1985), “Budget Deficits, Stabilization Policy and
Liquidity Preference: Keynes’s Post-War Policy Proposals”, in F.
Vicarelli (ed.), Keynes’s Relevance Today, London, Macmillan, pp.
28-50).
Of course, such a policy has only happened in a war economy. It
would be quickly opposed and was dropped in ‘peace time’. That’s
because it would threaten the very existence of capitalist accumulation,
as Michal Kalecki pointed out in his 1943 paper.
Now in 2018, the UK Labour Party wants to set up a ‘Keynesian-style’
National Investment Bank which would invest in infrastructure etc,
alongside the big five UK banks which will continue to conduct ‘business
as usual ‘ i.e. mortgages and financial speculation. Under these
Labour proposals, government investment (even if implemented in full)
would rise to only 3.5% of GDP, less than 20% of total investment in the
economy – hardly ‘socialisation’ a la Keynes at his most radical.
But perhaps President Trump’s version of Keynesian fiscal stimulus
(huge tax cuts for the rich and corporations , driving up the budget
deficit) will do the trick. It is an irony that it is Trump that has adopted Keynesian policy.
He certainly thinks it is working – with the US economy growing at a 4%
annual rate right now and official unemployment rates at near record
lows. But an excellent presentation by Trevor Evans of the Berlin School of Economics
poured cold water on that optimism. With a barrage of data, he showed
that corporate profits are actually stagnating, corporate debt is rising
and wage incomes are flat, all alongside highly inflated stock and bond
markets. The Trump boom is likely to fizzle out and turn into its
opposite.
Also, Arturo Guillen of the Metropolitan University of Mexico City,( IIPPE 2018 inglés)
reminded us that the medium term trajectory of US economic growth was
very weak with productivity growth very low and productive investment
crawling. In
that sense, the US was suffering from ‘secular stagnation’, but not for
the reasons cited by Keynesians like Larry Summers (lack of demand) or
by neoclassical critiques like Robert Gordon (ineffective innovation) but because of the low profitability for capital.
In another session, Joseph Choonara, took
this further. Choonara saw the current crisis rooted in a long decline
in profitability in the period from the late 1940s to the early 1980s.
The subsequent neoliberal period developed new mechanisms to defer
crises, notably financialisation and credit expansion. In the Long
Depression since 2009, driven largely by the central bank response, debt
continues to mount. The result is a financially fragile and uncertain
recovery, which is creating the conditions for a new crisis
There were also some sessions on Marxist economic theory at IIPPE,
including a view on why Marx sent so much time on learning differential
calculus (Andrea Ricci) and on why Marx’s transformation of value into
prices of production is dialectical in its solution (Cecilia Escobar).
Also Paul Zarembka from the University of Buffalo, US presented a paper arguing
that the organic composition of capital in the US did not rise in the
post-war period and so cannot be the cause of any fall in the rate of
profit.
His concepts and evidence do not hold water in my view. Zarembka
argues that there is a major problem concerns using variable capital v
in the denominator in the commonly-expressed organic composition of
capital, C/v. That is because v can change without any change in the
technical composition. Using, instead, what he calls the ‘materialized
composition of capital’, C/(v+s), movement in C/v can be separated
between the technical factor and the distributional factor since C/v =
(1 + s/v). With this approach, Zarembka reckons, using US data, he can
show no rise in the organic composition of capital in the US and no
connection between Marx’s basic category for laws of motion under
capitalism and the rate of profitability.
But I think his category C/(v+s) conflates the Marx’s view of the
basic ‘tendency’ (c/v) in capital accumulation with the lesser
‘counter-tendency’ (s/v) and thus confuses the causal process. This
makes Marx’s law of profitability ‘indeterminate’ in the same way that
Sweezy and Heinrich etc claim. As for the empirical consequences of rejecting Zarembka’s argument, I refer you to an excellent paper by Lefteris Tsoulfidis.
As I said previously, there were a host of sessions on Brazil,
Southern Africa and China, most of which I was unable to attend. On
China, what I did seem to notice was that nearly all presenters accepted that China was ‘capitalist’
in just the same way as the US or at least as Japan or Korea, if less
advanced. And yet they all recognised that the state played a massive
role in the economy compared to others – so is there a difference
between state capitalism and capitalism? I cannot say anything about
the papers on Brazil except for you to look at IIPPE 2018 – Abstracts. Brazil has an election within a month and I shall cover that then – and these are my past posts on Brazil.
There were other interesting papers on automation and AI (Martin
Upchurch) and on bitcoin and a cashless economy (Philip Mader), as well
as on the big issue of imperialism and dependency theory (which is back in mode).
The main plenary on the state of capitalism was addressed by Fiona Tregena from the University of Johannesburg.
Her primary area of research is on structural change, with a particular
focus on deindustrialisation. Prof Tregena has promoted the concept of
premature deindustrialisation.
Premature deindustrialisation can be
defined as deindustrialisation that begins at a lower level of GDP per
capita and/or at a lower level of manufacturing as a share of total
employment and GDP, than is typically the case internationally. Many of
the cases of premature deindustrialisation are in sub‐Saharan Africa, in
some instances taking the form of ‘pre‐industrialisation
deindustrialisation’. She has argued that premature deindustrialisation is likely to have especially negative effects on growth.
As for the state of political economy, Andrew Brown of Leeds University has
explained some of the failures of mainstream economics, particularly
marginal utility theory. Marginal utility theory has not to this day
been developed in a concrete and realistic direction not because it is
just vulgar apologetics for capitalism, but because it is theoretically
nonsense. Marginal utility theory can provide no comprehension of the macroeconomic aggregates that drive the reproduction and development of the economic system.
‘Financialisation’ is the word/concept that dominates IIPPE
conferences. It is a concept that has some value when it describes the
change in the structure of the financial sector from pure banks to a
range of non-deposit financial institutions and the financial activities
of non-financial corporations in the last 40 years.
But I am not happy with the concept when it used to suggest that the financial crash and the Great Recession were the result of some new ‘stage’ in capitalism.
From this, it is argued that crises now occur not because of the fall
in productive sectors but because of the speculative role of
‘’financialisation.’ Such an approach , in my view, is not only wrong
theoretically but does not fit the facts as well as Marx’s laws of
motion: the law of value, the law of accumulation and the law of
profitability.
For me, financialisation is not a new stage in capitalism that forces
us to reject Marx’s laws of motion in Capital and neoliberal economics
is not in some way the new economics of financialisation and a different
theory of crises from Marx’s. Finance does not drive capitalism,
profit does. Finance does not create new value or surplus value but
instead finds new ways to circulate and distribute it. The kernel of
crises thus remains with the production of value. Neoliberalism is
merely a word invented to describe the last 40 years or so of policies
designed to restore the profitability of capital that fell to new lows
in the 1970s. It is not the economics of a new stage in capitalism.
Sure, each crisis has its own particular features and the Great
Recession had that with its ‘shadow banking’, special investment
vehicles, credit derivatives and the rest. But the underlying cause
remained the profit nature of the production system. If financialisation
means the finance sector has divorced itself from the wider capitalist
system, in my view, that is clearly wrong.
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