Stop what you are doing right now and go here.

* New Left Review 59, September-October 2009: SPECULATIONS ON THE STATIONARY STATE

This is a must read essay by gopal balakrishnan.

Do we have one more phase of capitalist expansion, under the logic of green capitalism using increased participation and allowing p2p dynamics to mature to parity level? (this is one of my scenario’s, inspired by Carlota Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital). Or do we get, as at the end of the Roman system in the fifth century, centuries of stagnation?

Excerpt from gopal balakrishnan:

“What is the historical significance of the implosion of neo-liberalism, coming less than twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union? A disconcerting thought experiment suggests itself. The ussr, it might be recalled, had reached the summit of its power in the 70s, shortly before stumbling downward into a spiral of retrenchment, drift and collapse. Could a comparable reversal of fortune now be in store for the superpower of the West, one of those old-fashioned ‘ironies of history’? After all, a certain unity of opposites can be traced between an unbridled late capitalism and the centrally planned rust belts of the former Comecon—and precisely in the economic sphere, where they were diametrically counterposed. During the heyday of Reaganism, official Western opinion had rallied to the view that the bureaucratic administration of things was doomed to stagnation and decline because it lacked the ratio of market forces, coordinating transactions through the discipline of competition. Yet it was not too long after the final years of what was once called socialism that an increasingly debt- and speculation-driven capitalism began to go down the path of accounting and allocating wealth in reckless disregard of any notionally objective measure of value. The balance sheets of the world’s greatest banks are an imposing testimony to the breakdown of standards by which the wealth of nations was once judged.

In their own ways, both bureaucratic socialism and its vastly more affluent neo-liberal conqueror concealed their failures with increasingly arbitrary tableaux économiques. By the 80s the gdr’s reported national income was revealed to be a statistical artifact that grossly inflated its cramped standards of living. But in the same decade, an emerging circuit of global imbalances was beginning to generate considerable problems for the measurement of capitalist wealth. The coming depression may reveal that the national economic statistics of the period of bubble economics were fictions, not wholly unlike those operative in the old Soviet system.

Of course, the recurring crises of capitalism are supposed to be different from the terminal stages of non-capitalist civilizations and modes of production. Such social orders seem to have lacked capitalism’s distinctive capacity for creative destruction, for periodic renewal through downturns that liquidate inefficient conditions of production and life forms, opening up frontiers for the next round of expansion. In accordance with this pattern, nearly all commentators on today’s economic meltdown have assumed that this Schumpeterian tale of crisis and renovation will repeat itself in one form or another. But is it, in fact, inevitable that new phases of accumulation will emerge from the aftermath of what now promises to be an enormous and protracted shake-out? I would like to propose that this scenario of capitalist renewal is distinctly less likely than a long-term drift towards what the classical political economists used to call ‘the stationary state’ of civilization.”