What kind of crisis theorist are you?
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Follow the chart and find out.. (Click to enlarge)
Interesting table. Obviously the Party is in the direct line of descent on the left to Marx's "the limit to capital is capital itself", i.e. that crises are crises of capital accumulation caused by not enough profit coming to be made to allow accumulation to continue at the same rate.What I don't understand is the branch on the right asking "do periodic fluctuations need fixes?" Surely aren't "crises" and downward "fluctuations" the same? In which case "Real Business Cycle" theory could be classified as one negative reply to "So you're saying the limit to accumulation is internal to the structure of the accumulation process?" After all, they would answer "yes" to all the questions in the left line of descent till the last one.Again, answering "no" to the question "Is the kernel of crisis found in the sphere of production?" doesn't mean that you are necessarily an underconsumptionist. You could well be a monetarist or a follower of Ludwig von Mises who thinks that crises are caused by outside government intervention in the economy, a fairly popular view in some circles (even if not on the Left) and certainly as widespread as underconsumption theories. Or you could blame the banks and the bankers, as do both leftwing and rightwing populists. Just read any issue of the SPEW paper or Socialist Worker with their headlines such as "WE WON'T PAY FOR THE BANKERS' CRISIS!" (If you are a rightwing populist just insert the word "Jewish" before "bankers" or, rather, if you are a leftwing one delete it.)Finally, a further question could be added to the line of descent on the left: "So crises will continue as long as capitalism continues and nothing can be done about it?" Yes: you are (or should be) a socialist. No: you are a reformist posing as a Marxian socialist but in fact agreeing with the "the right Keynsians" who think that "periodic fluctuations need fixes" and with "left Keynesians" who answer yes to "Will this extra consumption require extensive government intervention to generate?" Once again read any leftwing populist paper with their calls for "a massive programme of public investment".
As in the debate with class and the creation of a class calculator, the media offers excellent and effective means to convey a message that woud be worthwhile for ourselves to copy.Surely, it is not beyond the capabilities of some of our more skilled and talented members to create similar flow-diagrams…a modified one of this for starters, incorporating Adams criticisms but also on other topics and having it placed in our educational section.Naturally, it may mean these members re-prioritising, for a time, what they already do and accomplish for the party.We should always be searching for easy straight forward methods of explaining our case and with economics we all know how it can be a struggle to understand all the various conflicting and sometimes complementary theories. A graphic illustration can make things clearer than just text or even a lecture could.Just a suggestion…shoot it down if you wish.I have neither the specific knowledge..(but i could acquire that, if the Party wants to be patient)…nor the computer soft-ware to make such a diagram that can go online…(but i could acquire those once i know what is required and search it out) …But i am sure it would be more convenient for another member, or members, more savvy on both these things, to accept the invitation and take up the challenge.Perhaps even one of our many committees that may be covered by such a remit could attempt such a venture. Or possibly a branch could undertake the task if they deem education of sufficient importance to devote themselves to it over and above what they already strive to do.Just a thought.
Comment from a Party member not on this forum:It’s interesting though not nearly as complete as it might be of course. Falling-Rate-of-Profit and disproportionality should be mentioned specifically (and profit squeeze is really a subset of the latter).Would be interesting to develop an alternative version.
On request via e-mail from an interested party, I've made this into a quiz but needs refining according to the comments in this topichttps://zingtree.com/host.php?style=buttons&tree_id=539725913&persist_names=Restart&persist_node_ids=1
According to Marx, "if production were proportionate, there would be no over-production" (Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 2) Would that not make him primarily a disproportionality theorist?
Great flow chart. I followed the questions that led me to Marx at week 5. …I loved this comment below. thanks and appreciation awarded of 30 minutes favor time for
Quote:On request via e-mail from an interested party, I've made this into a quiz but needs refining according to the comments in this topichttps://zingtree.com/host.php?style=buttons&tree_id=539725913&persist_names=Restart&persist_node_ids=1Below this paragraph is just my usual crazy thinking out loud writing. It's not polished and mostly just streem of conciousness I felt was releated to the subject. You might not feel it's related to the subject and I recomend that you ignore this unrequested information below if you generally find my unrequested information of negative value to you and a waste of your time and attention. This message is an effort to reduce the effect of any inadvertant intellectual flooding I may have contributed to objectionably. Sorry, If i've written an overwhelming volume that's caused you trouble in the past. I hope this warning paragraph helps you and you find it of value. Anyway, as I was thinking about after reading your comments and ansers as a group. . . I don't really consider myself just a "marxist" even though that's where the flow chart led me. . . Actually philosophically, I would put myself in some entirely different category and graph these as mutli-demensional n-space worldview idea clusters of beliefs. I'm more of a evolutionary nihilist in that I promote whatever I think the future will evolve to be. Socialism and marx have a compelling vision of the future that is very similar to my extrapolation of the nature of the future, so for that reason I support marx more than the other philosophies, which I extrapolate are doomed to extinction sooner or later. Maybe we can salvage some of the good social norms and practices and ideas from the other philosophies before they die out as intellectually credible beliefs in a measurable percentages of the population. the future I envision has a place for some of the ideas from each philosophy, but mostly I predict and expect it to be closest to the marx vision of the future. The ecosystem of base ideas and experience that support capitalism and marxian and other philosophies is changing in predictable ways in my opinon. The extrapolated projection I make is that marxian philosophies or their evolutionary children will eventually dominate the idea ecosystem of our society.So I promote marx mostly and agree mostly with the marx arguments. My solutions to the marx argument are quite different from his, but not incompatible or oppositional. I'm a lateral thinker by profession and practice and training so I wouldn't on principle restrict my solution set to any particular idea collection such as marx offers. Rather I believe in continuous evaluation of all ideas focused on and clustered non-lineary and orthogonally (on a n-dimensional cluster map of worlview beleifs) centered on marx or with marx near the center of overlapping venn diagrams of influence and attention. P.s. Sorry if that's information overload and too technical of an answer for some. In plain english, I meant to say I agree with Marx critiques as accurate but incomplete. I think his solutions I find more agreeable than most and rate Marx solutions in the top 90% of solution ideas to "wicked problems" (see wkipedia for what this means if you care). oops, sorry If this is hard to understand again. I've been exploring non-cartesian reasoning lately and focused on statisitcal based decision making and communication systems lately. Non-carteisian reasoning using massive statistical processing engineered and evolved to determine answers expediently is one of the research findings for how the human brain functions subconciously in the system1 unconcious "dual system theory" of pscyhology and cognitive neuroscience. so I've been trying out the statistical processing data based reasoning strategies lately and it's been great for thinking clearly and laterally about problems, but very bad for being fully understandable by the majority of the population. In layman terms, I've started to sound like some sort of insane artificial intellegence program. My appologies for the inconvenience you experience in trying to understand me.
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