John Bellamy Foster: `Capitalism has reached its limits'

Postscript to "The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis"

By John Bellamy Foster

October 26, 2008 – Six months ago the United States was already deep in a financial crisis – the roots of which were explained in ‘The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis' (Monthly Review, April 2008). Yet, the conditions now are several orders of magnitude worse and are affecting the entire world.

We are clearly in the midst of one of the great crises in the history of capitalism. More than a mere financial panic, what is taking place is a major devaluation of capital of still undetermined dimensions. Marx explained that capital was invariably over-extended in a boom and that in the crisis that followed a part of that capital was devalued, enabling the rest to return to profitability and to the process of accumulation and expansion.

However, we are now to some extent in uncharted territory: a phase of monopoly-finance capital that is in many ways unprecedented. Even at the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes explained that after a crisis modern capitalism might return to profitability without a return to full employment, full utilisation of existing capacity and strong growth. Our experience of the last half-century has shown that capitalism at its core was able to avoid stagnation only by vast military expenditures and, when that proved insufficient, by an enormous inflation of asset values and speculation, i.e. "financialisation". This growth multiplied by the boom psychology on the way up (the "wealth effect") turned out to also have a contracting multiplier effect on the way down. These factors help to explain why the economic crisis in the real economy is so severe at present, and why there is no chance of an immediate restarting of the growth process.

Many people first woke up to the seriousness of the crisis only on September 18, 2008, when US Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson told Congress that the US financial sector was within days of a complete meltdown and that a US$700 billion bailout for the banks was urgently needed. Since then (and indeed even before) vast amounts of government dollars have been poured into the financial structure (all told the financial exposure of the U.S. government alone in the entire crisis has exceeded $5 trillion at this writing), including direct injection of capital into major banks and partial nationalisations.¹ Yet, still there is little sign of the crisis abating. Insolvency is spreading through the economy from consumers to banks, to non-financial firms, back to consumers, in a vicious cycle. The fact that the economy in recent decades was being lifted mainly by financialisation makes the problem all that much more severe.

The entire world economy is now affected. Already one economy in the European sphere itself – Iceland – has experienced a meltdown, requiring rescue from outside, and some have called Iceland the "canary in the coalmine." Over this last neoliberal epoch, the United States and its European allies have forced upon the entire globe a model of the free flow of capital across borders. The result today is the free flow of catastrophe. Only by the imposition, first, of capital controls and the establishment, second, of non-market based "South-South" cooperation can "emerging" economies avoid becoming the worse victims of the crash.

In these dire economic circumstances we should of course be careful not to fall into an exaggerated frame of mind. It is important to remember that a breakdown of capitalism as a whole will not occur by mere economics alone. Given time to work things out on its own terms the system will no doubt recover – though a full recovery could be many years away, if possible at all.

The real historical issue before us is to what extent the world's population is willing to wait for this crisis to be resolved on capitalist terms, so that the whole irrational process of exploitation and boom and bust can gain steam again – or whether they shall decide to insert themselves into the process to say ‘Enough!'.  It is this political insertion from below that the powers that be most fear. From their Olympian position at the top of the system they know perhaps better than anyone else that the conditions exist for the possible renewal of socialism on a global scale. Capitalism has reached its limits as a progressive force and its famous "creative destruction" has turned into a destructive creativity in which both the world's people and the planet are now in jeopardy.  Indeed, for the world's population and the earth taken a whole there is today no real alternative – to socialism.

1  "Government's Leap into Banking Has Its Perils," New York Times, October 18, 2008.

[John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review.  This postscript was written for the Portuguese translation of "The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis" that will appear in Revista Outubro, Brazil. It first appeared at MRzine and has been posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission.]