Some time ago, I had a conversation with a colleague about the ways in
which the ostensible financialization of large U.S. firms reflected, or
was even just an epiphenomena, of the internationalization of production
chains. Reading the chapters for Brenner's class today, I was reminded
of this, because I think one could make a case that the disagreement
between Brenner and, say, Panitch and Gindin comes down to very
different views of financialization. Basically, is the outsized share of
financial profits in the U.S. economy since the 80s just froth, i.e.
paper returns enabled by the expansion of paper purchasing power that by
necessity must end in a 1-for-1 deflation sooner or later, or is it an
alternative mode of accumulation (albeit no less contradictory than
other modes of capitalist accumulation, or if anything more so)? The
problem is that as stated, both positions aren't really viable.
Brenner's claim, I think, is overly focused on consumer finance,
i.e. debt as crutch for consumption, which is certainly important but
overlooks the growing importance of financial income for even
nonfinancial corporations (or, at most, just assumes that the latter is
the flipside of the former, pointing to auto financing and the like).
The alternative claim just remains kind of mystical -- "financial
profits" do in fact need to come from somewhere, and I've never seen
much concrete evidence for Harvey's suggestion that it's "accumulation
by dispossession." (Hell, I've never even been quite clear what he means
by that.)
If it is the case that much "financialization" is just the accounting manifestation
of expansion of overseas subsidiaries and of offshore subcontracting,
then it seems to me that an analysis of this could shed a lot of light
on this rather state debate. Do Brenner's calculations of the rate of
profit properly take into account the total returns U.S. capital earns, taking into account the full production chain? Is U.S. capital in fact earning a healthy global rate
of return, or is all of this internationalization of production (and
the tax-accounting tricks that accompany it) just a further
manifestation of the diminishing-returns scramble to cut costs in the
face of over-competition that Brenner diagnosis as the root cause of the
crisis that began in the 70s? On the other side, if this is the real
source of the profitability of "financial" strategies, is it even valid
to call it an "alternative mode of accumulation"?
No comments:
Post a Comment