#leo panitch

[weil-weil-lautre]

Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin on The Political Economy of American Empire

[zwischenstadt]

It was the abstractness of such utopian thinking, of course, that led Marx to insist on the crucial importance of analysing 'objective conditions'.  Bloch had no doubt about how necessary this was for 'cooling down.... totally extravagant abstractly utopian fanaticism' and for the development of the kind of practical consciousness that would allow the carrying through of the dream to reality through the transformation of social relations.  But the unmasking of ideologies and illusions by what he called the 'cold stream' of Marxism's 'historical and current practical conditional analysis' had always to be mixed with the kind of appreciation of 'subjective conditions' present in the 'warm stream' of the Marxist tradition.  '[F]ermenting in the process of the real itself', Bloch insisted, '[is] the concrete forward dream: anticipating elements that are a component of reality itself.  Thus the will towards utopia is entirely compatible with object-based tendency, in fact is confirmed and at home within it.'  The best kind of Marxism demonstrates that 'enthusiasm and sobriety, awareness of the goal and analysis of the given facts go hand in hand.  When the young Marx called on people to think at last, to act "like a disillusioned man who has come to his senses", it was not to dampen the enthusiasm of the goal, but to sharpen it.'

Leo Panitch, Renewing Socialism: Transforming Democracy, Strategy and Imagination

[zwischenstadt]

Rather than taking the US trade deficit as a measure of industrial decline, it is instructive to consider US exports and imports separately.  The growth in the volume of US exports in the two decades up to 2007- even as the trade deficit accumulated- averaged a very robust 6.6 percent, leaving it only marginally behind Germany and China, the world's largest exporters; it was the relative expansion of US imports that was the source of the growing deficit.  The deficit, in other words, primarily came from increased US consumption, which grew faster than in other advanced capitalist countries.  This was partly linked to the very high income growth and conspicuous consumption of the most well-off segments of the US population, but it was also due to much faster population growth than in Europe and Japan, the longer hours worked by much of the US population, and, very significantly, their increased consumer debt.  This was supported by the international flow of funds into the US despite the size of the trade deficit.  It was in good part US consumer spending that maintained effective global demand into the first years of the twenty-first century.  The US trade deficit was not an adequate measure of the overall productive power of American capital; rather, it indicated its place in global capitalism.  The case of the Apple iPod illustrates this at a product level; since its final point of assembly was China, each iPod sold in the US represented an increase in the US trade deficit of $145, even though it involved an increase in the surplus captured by Apple from domestic- and especially- foreign labor. The average annual real rate of growth of the American economy in the quarter-century after the resolution of the crisis of the 1970s (from 1989 to 2007) was 3.5 percent.  This was higher than in any similar period from 1830 to 1950, and was only marginally less than during the so-called postwar 'golden age'; and, unlike then, US GDP growth in the quarter-century after 1983 surpassed that of the other advanced capitalist countries.  In the years from 1950 to 1973, US manufacturing productivity growth averaged 2.5 percent, well below that of the other advanced capitalist countries; between 1983 and 2007, it increased quite dramatically to 3.5 percent, running ahead of all the other G7 economics.  And in terms of attractiveness as a place for capitalists to invest the US was still, despite the wide dispersal of FDI to Europe and Asia by 2007, the largest single recipient of FDI inflows, and the rate of US manufacturing productivity growth ran considerably ahead of the growth in labor compensation at home.  As a result, the share of after-tax corporate profits relative to US GDP earned by American corporations in 2006 was at its highest level since 1945. Moreover, US MNCs' operations abroad consistently contributed about 30 percent to total US profits in the new millennium, compared with less than 20 percent in the 1980s.  At the same time, the foreign operations of so many American banks (in 2007, Goldman Sachs had about 8,000 people in Europe, including consultants, over four-fifths of them in London) were a significant factor in the increasing share of total profit going to US finance.  Notably, those profits increasingly came from the fees charged for the provision of an array of services (some of them payroll and accounting outsourced from industry) rather than returns on loans (the share of the total bank income coming from services other than interest on loans rose from 15 percent to 35 percent between 1990 and 2006). It was largely the failure to take sufficient account of the dominance and integration of American production and finance that led to the misreading of what US trade deficits signaled by way of undermining the value of the dollar and its place as the world currency.  It was the balance of capital flows more than the balance of trade that now determined the dollar's value.  The issue of US 'imbalances' that so many observers were fixated on in the first years of the new millennium failed to capture this central point.  Far from the capital inflows signaling the dollar's weakness, and being significant mainly in offsetting US trade deficits, they highlighted the central role of US banks and MNCs in the global economy, and the extent to which the integration of so many Third World countries was dependent on the pull of both US consumer and financial markets.

Leo Panitch & Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism

[zwischenstadt]

When in 1942 'An American Proposal' envisaged the replacement of 'a dead or dying imperialism' with an American empire of a new kind, in order to establish 'universal free trade' by reorganizing 'the economic resources of the world so as to make possible a return to the system of free enterprise in every country,' it acknowledged that the primary barrier to this was the 'uprising of the international proletariat' that had occurred over the previous twenty years.  Despite all the subsequent Cold War rhetoric, it was not the threat of external Soviet military expansion but the new political and economic strength of the working classes in so many societies, including within the advanced capitalist countries, which was the real barrier.  It was only overcome, as we have seen, once the postwar contradictions of strong working classes coexisting with increasingly strong capitalist classes had led to the crisis of the 1970s, and then to the defeats suffered by the working classes in its wake.  To the extent that, in the course of the postwar years, the working classes increasingly lost interest in the idea of socialism, this had much to do with the belief that the Bretton Woods agreement and Keynesian economics would usher in a crisis-free, socially just 'mixed economy.'  Yet not only the crisis of the 1970s, but also the economic instability and growing inequality of the neoliberal decades that followed, proved this to be an illusion. Equally illusory is the belief that there is a way back to a supposed postwar 'real economy' from the finance-led capitalism which greased the wheels of globalization.  Capitalist finance is in truth no less real than capitalist production- and not just because of the way it affects the rest of the economy during both boom and bust, but because it is integral to capitalist production and accumulation as well as to the extension and deepening of global capitalism.  There is in fact no possibility of going back to the largely mythical 'mixed economy' of the New Deal and Keynesian welfare state are imagined to have represented.  In the US itself, as the last chapter showed, just as democracy appeared to trump race with the election of a black president, so did he reinforce once in office, even through his timid reforms, the neoliberal system of class power and inequality.  We have seen Southern and Eastern Europeans being sharply rebuked for even having aspirations to catch up with what Northern Europeans can still claim from their reduced welfare states after the neoliberal reforms of recent decades.  An already marked democratic deficit in Europe was further expanded, as the crisis in Greece and Italy ushered in 'national unity' governments headed by central bank technocrats, whose mettle was supposed to be tested by whether they could calm German anxieties about 'moral hazard'- which would itself largely depend on whether they could 'get tough enough with the unions.

The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin

[zwischenstadt]

Most US job losses stemmed not from foreign outsourcing but from the impact of the sustained increases in manufacturing productivity at home, which in the boom of the 1990s was compensated for by job creation (usually at lower wages) in other sectors.  In the context of the Asian crisis it was widely predicted that manufacturing unemployment would soar as Korean, Thai, Indonesian, and other currencies were devalued, but this lowered consumer prices in the US without any significant impact on US production, except for the steel industry.  China's entry into the WTO considerably changed the overall picture, but while US manufacturing job losses were indeed heavy after 2001 (especially in auto and electrical appliances, as well as the long-suffering textile and apparel sector), the US was still producing more manufactured goods and receiving more foreign investment in 2007 than all the BRICs (Brazil, Russian, India, and China) combined. Rather than taking the US trade deficit as a measure of industrial decline, it is instructive to consider US exports and imports separately.  The growth in the volume of US exports in the two decades up to 2007- even as the trade deficit accumulated- averaged a very robust 6.6 percent, leaving it only marginally behind Germany and China, the world's largest exporters; it was the relative expansion of US imports that was the source of the growing deficit.  The deficit, in other words, primarily came from increased US consumption, which grew faster than in other advanced capitalist countries.  This was partly linked to the very high income growth and conspicuous consumption of the most well-off segments of the US population, but it was also due to much faster population growth than in Europe and Japan, the longer hours worked by much of the US population, and, very significantly, their increased consumer debt.  This was supported by the international flow of funds into the US despite the size of the trade deficit.  It was in good part US consumer spending that maintained effective global demand into the first years of the twenty-first century.  The US trade deficit was not an adequate measure of the overall productive power of American capital; rather, it indicated its place in global capitalism.  The case of the Apple iPod illustrates this at a product level; since its final point of assembly was China, each iPod sold in the US represented an increase in the US trade deficit of $145, even though it involved an increase in the surplus captured by Apple from domestic and- especially- foreign labor.

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin

[alternativassi]

Sobre Leo Panitch teórico, revolucionario recientemente desaparecido

Sobre Leo Panitch teórico, revolucionario recientemente desaparecido

Para Leo: el Maestro, el Amigo, el Camarada  Michalis Spourdalakis La noticia de su hospitalización llegó inesperadamente hace unas semanas. Cuando las cosas se volvieron más difíciles para él, Skype se convirtió en la herramienta para llevar a cabo sus “compromisos”. Puede verse en esa conferencia sobre el socialismo en el siglo XXI en enero, organizada por el Instituto Nicos Poulantzas. Su…

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[alternativassi]

Leo Panitch no está muerto

Leo Panitch no está muerto

Leo Panitch est décédé samedi du COVID-19 et d’une pneumonie peu de temps après un diagnostic de cancer. Il avait 75 ans. Una opinión personal    Al enterarme de la muerte de Leo Panitch comencé a escribir un mensaje en Whatsapp. Escribí “Panich“, y el predictivo de Google me corrigió: Panitch. La palabra ya era tendencia reconocible, en cuestión de horas.Unos días antes había recibido una…

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[studentprotests]

Leo Panitch, intellectual pillar of the Canadian left, dead at 75 of COVID-19..

Leo Victor Panitch, one of the intellectual pillars of the Canadian left and a leading scholar of the global depredations of neoliberalism, died Saturday from COVID-19. He was 75.

https://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/alberta-diary/2020/12/leo-panitch-intellectual-pillar-canadian-left-dead-75-covid-19?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rabble-news+%28rabble.ca+-+News+for+the+rest+of+us%29