Writer and activist Loren Goldner contextualizes the current economic crisis and class struggles in a theory of capitalist development.
Our task must be to articulate the full implications of that positive power which lies beyond the disorientation of today. We must show where that potential surfaces in micro-ways in the struggles of the present.
Fitch’s “In Defense of Washington and Wall Street”, while making some good points about the unraveling of the world financial system, is seriously flawed.
Comrades, history has offered us an opening which, if we fail, will not come again in our lifetimes.
A talk with Loren Goldner on the current capitalist crisis.
“Interview with independent writer and activist, Loren Goldner.
Far from being a remote “economic” concept, fictitious capital leads us straight to the central political questions of today, and above all those questions confronting the international left.
The world is still in the early phase of an inflationary blow-out centered on the indebted “U.S. consumer” as the “locomotive” of the world economy.
The following is a “thought experiment” which attempts to see fictitious capital in relation to the end of capitalism.
Incredible as it may sound, ever since the late 1950’s, the world economy has been tossing around a “hot potato” of an ever-increasing mass of “nomad dollars” (dollars held outside the U.S.) whose actual conversion into tangible wealth would plunge the world into a deflationary crash.
The fundamental problem for U.S. capitalism is to globally circulate the mass of fictitious capital that has built up over 45 years of subsidized dollar hegemony, making possible that capital’s valorization by extracting an adequate amount of surplus value.
Fictitious capital is the gap between total price and total value on a world scale.
The discussion between Loren Goldner and Aufheben is, in essence, about the role of fictitious capital in the crisis of capitalism but they disagree already about what fictitious capital actually is.
There will be expanded social reproduction in communism, focused once again on the “production for production’s sake”, not in the Ricardian sense of capitalist productivism but in the communist sense of creativity.
It is hardly a secret that the contemporary world is one of tremendous dislocation in which every advance of capital seems to entail, and require, a major retrogression of the human.
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The following is a reply to the Aufheben Critique of Remaking of the American Working Class.
Without any distinction between productive and unproductive labor, and without a serious look at the social reproduction of labor power, and without an awareness of how the vast inflow of foreign capital into the U.S. stock market skews figures for “American” firms, what can figures on “profits” mean?
I am writing this in late October 1998 in what seems to be a pause in the latest phase of the world financial crisis.
PDF available for download.