Today Paul Krugman’s NYT op-ed points out the obvious cultural difference between US and Europe that American cultural commentators seem to overlook: the differences between the news media. Krugman’s bone of contention is clearly cable TV news, and I think he undersells the transatlantic differences between print news media in framing international events. One of the reasons I’ve become such an avid Guardian reader is that they consistently offer a different, often smarter understanding of world events than even the prestigious American papers.
How sad, then, to read the Comment page of today’s Guardian. I often disagree with the page’s analysis, but find it enlightening reading nonetheless. Not so with George Monbiot’s op-ed. I should have been warned off by the cheesy lead (”We are a biological weapon. On Saturday the anti-war movement released some 70,000 tonnes of organic material on to the streets of London, and similar quantities in locations all over the world.”), but what was really silly was the argument that the US is being driven to Iraq war by the need to use up surplus capital:
The underlying problem the US confronts is the one which periodically afflicts all successful economies: the over-accumulation of capital. Excessive production of any good - be it cars or shoes or bananas - means that unless new markets can be found, the price of that product falls and profits collapse. Just as it was in the early 1930s, the US is suffering from surpluses of commodities, manufactured products, manufacturing capacity and money. Just as it was then, it is also faced with a surplus of labour, yet the two surpluses, as before, cannot be profitably matched. This problem has been developing in the US since 1973. It has now tried every available means of solving it and, by doing so, maintaining its global dominance. The only remaining, politically viable option is war.
This classically Marxist argument is especially disappointing because it comes from David Harvey, whose work on postmodernity I rather like. Krugman actually provides the best refutation I’ve seen of this “doctrine of global glut”. In sum, the basic confusion that Monbiot/Harvey seem to entertain is between the problem a given business or industry may face (overproduction, dropping prices) and the problem of a national economy as a whole. If Ford’s, Nike’s or Chiquita’s sales or profits dip (sales, prices and profits are not necessarily the same thing by the way), there’s no reason why capital won’t find more profitable outlets. Sometimes capital can’t or won’t find such outlets, but those times are the business-cycle recessions explained by Keynes, in which savings do not translate into investment, recessions which generally can be fixed by fiscal and monetary policy (there wasn’t too much money in the 30s, by the way, but too little of it). And if there is such a surplus of labor, why doesn’t the cost of labor fall to make business more profitable?
Economics aside, this doesn’t even hold up as political analysis. Wall Street is NOT eager for this war Â- maybe grudgingly accepting, but that has more to do with the American-flag-lapel-pin political culture of financiers than for the profit prospects of capital proper. And yes, the oil industry must look forward to a more stable Middle East and a wedge in OPEC, but beyond that, does anyone really think Iraq is going to be such a booming market for American goods to justify the exorbitant price of war and nation-building? And if capital were really the driving force behind American foreign policy, why was Clintonian foreign policy so different, when presumably the economic system hasn’t changed?
The unfortunate thing is that the accumulation crisis reasoning detracts from the real reasons for current US foreign policy (the rising power of conservative think-tanks and commentary media) and at the same time imposes an oddly pessimistic vision of political change Â- if capital has such inexorable needs, how is voluntary action, even the “biological warfare” of street demonstrations supposed to do any good, short of revolution? As Krugman said in another context, “Those who preach the doctrine of global glut are tilting at windmills, when there are some real monsters out there that need slaying.”
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