The Economies' Cyclical Behaviour After Wwii

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE THE ECONOMIES’ CYCLICAL BEHAVIOUR AFTER WWII How Do Crises of Underconsumption and Overproduction Arise? Like other Marxist theoretical models, also capitalist overproduction of goods must be interpreted in terms of values and not merely of physical quantities of produced goods. Th e permanent struggle between rival capitals involves the development of competitive tech- nologies that permit higher productivity, higher profi ts and greater production of goods. However, the goods, under capitalism, are produced only if they are sold in the market. Th ey enable the closure of the cycle of capital (re) production, enhancement of the capital, the realization of exchange value. A commodity is not produced just because someone needs it (this identifi es only the use value), but because someone who needs it, can buy it, and thus allows the realization of its intrinsic value. On several occasions Marx, ahead of his own time, criticized these theories. Th e problem has no solution because the temporary increase in demand, supported by the State in various capacities and in diff erent ways, moves in time, postponing overproduction and repeating it at a higher and sharper level. Th is is because the temporary valorization of commodities does not stabilize the market at determined production quotas (we should only imagine a stagnation). Instead it stimulates the productive sphere to produce more goods than before. Th e crisis of overproduction cannot be eliminated because it is inherent to capitalist production, where capital always pushes beyond the latest (temporary) limit to increase itself. Th is means more commodities, more capital and the inability to close the cycle of capital (re) production positively. Cycles and Economic Crises Between 1945 and 1965 there were important changes in the interna- tional economic position of the United States. Th ese transformations were the result of three fundamental factors: 298 chapter twenty-three a. the economies ravaged by the war recovered, began to compete and to claim their space in the World economy; b. the U.S. economy, since the economic crisis of 1969–1971, began to show clear signs of exhaustion of its accumulation model; c. there was a new technological paradigm that diff ers from the mate- rial base of the Fordist Keynesian cycle during the period aft er World War II. Scholars of the capitalist cycle virtually disappeared from North American universities, and when the economy began a process of con- traction in the late 1960s, in 1969, neoclassical bourgeois economists did not perceive it. Th e slowdown persisted in every case, and it cre- ated unemployment and falling incomes for millions of people. Th e experiences of the periods 1964–65 and 1966–67, during the Vietnam war, when military spending revived the rate of industrial growth impacting on GNP, had deceived many people that the economic crisis could be quickly overcome. Nevertheless, with the period that began in 1969, for the fi rst time aft er World War II here was a fall of real economic indicators, not caused by war damage, accompanied by a rapid and continuous increase in prices, a phenomenon that lasted more than a year. Th at is how, in the 1970s, the North-American economy’s cyclical course started. It had great importance and great impact on the world capitalist economy and in particular on the economy of the United States. We are referring to the 1969–1971 crisis, whose roots can be found back in the 1960s and that damaged the entire capitalist economy which, from then on, depended on the course of the U.S. economy reducing to dust the positive attitude that had prevailed in the aca- demic and offi cial circles of the North-American Government.1 Th e capitalist economy during the 1969–71 crisis began to change one of the aspects that characterized the dynamics of the cycles and crises of the postwar period. While GNP was falling, prices rose and many developed capitalist economies synchronized their stages of the crisis. Th e cause of these phenomena should be looked for within the process of exhaustion of the processes of dynamization that had been 1 Actually, since 1964 the economy had contracted, but the heavy investment for the Vietnam War helped delaying the crisis that eventually occurred as a recession during 1966–67. For further analysis of this topic cf. Vasapollo, Casadio, Petras, Veltmeyer (2004)..

Load more