review of 2 books by harvey

Disappointed, I thought the title was a reference against Harvey. It has this critical tone throughout, but buys completely into his underconsumptionism.

Really? I didn't get that from the article at all.

It's been a while since I've read Limits to Capital, but I'm pretty sure Harvey's so-called spatial-temporal fix arises from overaccumulation, not underconsumption. Still, it's entirely possible you know much more about this than I do since crisis theory isn't my strong suit.

Anyways, what do you see as the dangers of an underconsumptionist theory, Noa? I know in the past that it has been a powerful idea/political position in the reformist labor movement, used to argue something like, "look, friendly capitalists, if only workers could get a greater portion of the surplus we can totally have a crisis-free wondercapitalism, yeah?"

The review says Harvey accepts both positions.

Harvey's Cartoony crisis video seems to take an underconsumptist position.

"A Short History Of Neoliberalism" (written in the midst of the "boom") doesn't seem to think there's a crisis at all.

Also, unless a theory gives another reason for the over-accumulation - ie, a declining rate of profit, "over-accumulation" and "over-consumption" are pretty much indistinguishable - ie, a lack of demand.

Did you mean that 'over-production' (rather than 'over-accumulation') and 'under-consumption' (rather than 'over-consumption') are pretty much indistinguishable?

Based on the first formula of the circuit of value-in-process

M — C ... P ... C' — M'

Both "over-production" and "under-consumption" refer to the "last"* transformation in this sequence, C' — M'. That is, the invested capital is now in the form of the output of the production process C', and cannot find sufficient consumers with sufficient money and demand to complete the realisation step of circulation.

My reading of what RedHughs said, is that simply by shifting the location of the crisis from the C' — M' step, back to the "initial"* M — C step and calling it "over-accumulation", in the absence of any other posited cause of the crisis (e.g. TRPF), is essentially relying on the same implied cause as overproduction/underconsumption, just in a more obfuscated way.

In plain language, what does it mean to say a "lack of profitable investment opportunities"? It means you can invest in lots of things but when you produce your brand new left-handed smokeshifters, you won't be able to sell them, so they won't return a profit (or even the principal), hence it's not a profitable investment opportunity. The profitable qualifier is the weasel word here, that points implicitly forwards to the C' — M' problem.

* last/initial only relative to this formulation of the circuit. Of course it's a circuit in reality so it doesn't really have a start and finish as such.

Well I meant under-consumption to begin with.. (Darn typos)

On the other hand, I would use "over-accumulation" and "over-production" almost synonymously. "over-accumulation" is too many means of production. When these means of product are used, they naturally produce too much stuff (see quote below and my comments on it).

What I was referring to, is that when these theorists are talking about "over-accumulation" and "over-production", what they are effectively meaning is "mis-accumulation". You have an over-production of particular items for which there are can only be so much demand. China is over-producing office buildings and bridges. The average Chinese probably does need some things that could be produced - like housing, clothing or whatever but present day capitalism doesn't produce to needs.

But when you talk about over-production without this explanation, it literally means the same as simple underconsumption - capitalism is producing things and there isn't enough demand for them.

Even more, mis-production and under-consumption look about the same at first blush. The immediate explanation for an economic detail is pretty much always that companies can't sell things. The distinction between the various declines comes in terms of why they can't sell things.

Now, I think the article in generally actually reasonably good in explaining the various phenomena.

Or more accurately, this is how over-accumulation once appeared.

Today, capitalist society has a far larger palette of counter-measures to mask this over-accumulation. A massively expand speculative sector, institutionalized crisis systems. State intervention for the protection of favor sectors, "public-private partnerships", etc.

But thing to remember is that none of counter-measures involve solving the problem of "mis-production" but rather solving the particular capitalist's immediate problem of lack of profits. Indeed, the "progress" in economic ideology in the last twenty years has been in discovering ways that capitalist production can continue without resolving its immediate contradiction, allows those contradictions to worsen till now things pretty "intense" (though capital is no doubt working on an even larger palette of options as I speak).

Thus we have a modern economy where few producers are independent of state or monopolistic programs to maintain profits and thus we have a single financial complex that is inherently unstable, constantly maintained by a multitude of small and large interventions and provides massive money profits to the largest players without being anything akin to "healthy capitalism".

Another thing is that one-product models are a tempting way to explain the various models but they seriously miss some crucial aspects of the modern situation - i.e. a one-product model can never show the tendency of capitalists to produce the wrong thing.

There is a useful short critical review of 'The enigma...' book here:

http://thecommune.co.uk/2012/09/13/the-enigma-of-david-harvey/