mck@ratex.UUCP (Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan) (05/11/85)
Lines marked with one '>' are those of Richard Carnes; lines marked with two are mine. >>Business cycles are indeed not a strong point of Capitalism; nor are they a >>weak point. They are, in fact, not a point of Capitalism at all, but rather >>of government manipulation of the money supply which distorts patterns of >>savings and investment. > >Please clear something up for us, Dan'l: Are you using "Capitalism" >as a synonym for the Free Economy? Not quite, Dicky. Capitalism is a system relying on market-processes WITHIN a Free Economy; but people within a Free Economy are permitted to voluntarily reject market-processes, albeit at great economic cost. > Or are you using the term in my >sense of a society in which production is undertaken to serve the >accumulation of capital, by using exchange-value to produce more >exchange-value in an endless cycle? I reject your nomenclature for a number of reasons. 1) It has the same feature that perturbs you about the rhetoric of some Libertarians. That is, you DEFINE 'capitalism' as having characteristics not included in the conventional denotation, but then use it as if it refers to the the conventional concept. As an example I would note that you refer to Libertarians as 'capitalist'. 2) The notion that exchange value is used to produce more exchange value is true but misleading, in that it is not exchange value *per se* which produces the further exchange value. 3) The definition that you use explicitly is worthwhile ONLY if we accept certain assumptions about the course of history -- assumptions which conflict with empirical evidence. > Is it possible to have business >cycles under capitalism in your sense, even if capitalism itself is >not the cause of business cycles? Yes, but it's incredibly unlikely. Business cycles are recurring fluctations in the overall level of business activity. For there to be business cycles, there would have to be a series of exogenous attacks on the economy. If such a thing occurred, it would cause cycles in any economy, and a market economy would be best able to respond to them (something which even some Socialists acknowledge). I guess that I won't answer the questions that you say that you won't ask. Back later, DKMcK