Mainstream economics and money trees

“There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist.” Such was the opening para of a long essay in the New York Review of Books by leftist anthropologist David Graeber, author of the monumental Debt, the first 5000 years. Graeber was reviewing a new book by Robert Skidelsky, the biographer of John Maynard Keynes and epigone of Keynes’ economic thought and policies.

Graeber was attacking mainstream economics and its policy makers for not seeing the coming of the global financial crash and the ensuing Great Recession and for still not learning anything since.  Neoclassical economic theory still dominates the mainstream and so economics is locked into ‘microfoundations’ based on unrealistic assumptions, namely that crises are really momentary ‘shocks’ to a basically harmonious market economy where equilibrium is the tendency, not disequilibrium.

But was mainstream economics ever ‘fit for purpose’?  Surely, that depends on what the purpose is.  With the end of classical political economy in the mid-19th century and the beginning of the neoclassical counter-revolution, political economy was no longer an objective analysis of the laws of motion governing capitalism.  Instead, it became ‘vulgar economics’, as Marx called it, designed to be an apologia for capital.  In that sense, it was very fit for purpose.  Until, of course, it was exposed by regular and recurring failures in capitalist production and the evident inequalities it breeds.

The apologia of the mainstream continues.  Take a recent review by Martin Wolf, the FT’s economics columnist.  Wolf praises to the skies a new book by mainstream French economist, Thomas Philippon, who shows that “Over the past two decades, competition and competition policy have atrophied, with dire consequences, Philippon writes in this superbly argued and important book. America is no longer the home of the free-market economy.”

Philippon is part of that group of modern mainstream economists, like Olivier Blanchard or latest Nobel prize winner Esther Duflo, who are supposedly delivering meticulous empirical work to reveal the state of capitalism. So this is not apologia but science. But what does Phillipon conclude from his work showing that US capitalism is not a free market economy after all?  Wolf: “Philippon insists that he believes passionately in the value of competition. Indeed, The Great Reversal contains a chapter arguing just that. …The great obstacle to action in the US is the pervasive role of money in politics. The results are the twin evils of oligopoly and oligarchy.”  So the policy aim is not to replace capitalism but to restore “competitive capitalism”.  In other words, let us return to some mythical model of a ‘free market’ economy and all will be well.

Wolf sees the problem as the ‘pervasive role of money in politics’.  So back to Graeber.  Graeber claims that “Ostensibly an attempt to answer the question of why mainstream economics rendered itself so useless in the years immediately before and after the crisis of 2008, it is really an attempt to retell the history of the economic discipline through a consideration of the two things—money and government—that most economists least like to talk about.”

In his book review, Graeber is concerned to expose the policy of austerity that supported by the mainstream economists and followed by the politicians in the wake of the Great Recession.  Austerity (cuts in public spending) was adopted as the only necessary policy in order to get public debt levels down.  Public debt had been driven up by borrowing to bail out the banks and by the costs of the ensuing recession, which led to a collapse in tax revenues and a rise in welfare and unemployment benefits.

Typical of the justification for austerity were the words of UK PM Theresa May in the 2017 election.  She argued that ‘money does not grow on trees and it cannot be created out of thin air, like magic.’  Graeber retorts: “The truly extraordinary thing about May’s phrase is that it isn’t true. There are plenty of magic money trees in Britain, as there are in any developed economy. They are called “banks.” Since modern money is simply credit, banks can and do create money literally out of nothing, simply by making loans. Almost all of the money circulating in Britain at the moment is bank-created in this way.”  Money can be created out of thin air and capitalist economies could be revived by public spending financed by the banking system with injections of cash.  For Graeber, the failure to see this is a key fallacy of mainstream economics.

But is he right?  Frances Coppola is a leftist ex-City economist.  She answers Graeber’s argument clearly,“it is entirely incorrect to say that money is “spirited from thin air.” It is not…. when banks create a new loan asset, they must also create an equal and opposite liability, in the form of a new demand deposit. This demand deposit, like all other customer deposits, is included in central banks’ measures of broad money. In this sense, therefore, when banks lend, they create money. But this money has in no sense been “spirited from thin air”. It is fully backed by a new asset – a loan.” 

Coppola continues “in theory a central bank could literally “spirit money from thin air” without asset purchases or lending to banks. This is Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop.” The central bank would become technically insolvent as a result, but provided the government is able to tax the population, that wouldn’t matter.” 

But “The ability of the government to tax the population depends on the credibility of the government and the productive capacity of the economy. …. So faith in money is, in reality, faith in the government that guarantees it. That in turn requires faith in the future productive capacity of the economy. As the productive capacity of any economy ultimately comes from the work of people, we could therefore say that faith in money is faith in people, both those now on the earth and those who will inhabit it in future. The “magic money tree” is made of people, not banks.”

Having suggested that money can go on trees because commercial and central banks can create it out of thin air, Graeber goes on with little or no criticism to endorse the Keynesian views expressed in Skidelsky’s new book.  “Accordingly, one of the most significant books to come out of the UK in recent years would have to be Robert Skidelsky’s Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics.”

Greaber mentions that “Skidelsky is best known as the author of the definitive, three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, and has for the last three decades sat in the House of Lords as Baron of Tilton, affiliated at different times with a variety of political parties, and sometimes none at all. During the early Blair years, he was a Conservative, and even served as opposition spokesman on economic matters in the upper chamber; currently he’s a cross-bench independent, broadly aligned with left Labour. In other words, he follows his own flag. Usually, it’s an interesting flag.”  You’d think that history might make him more cautious about his praise for Skidelsky.  Indeed, as I have shown in several other posts, Skidelsky aims to find ways the save capitalism from itself by adopting Keynesian theory and policies.

Graeber recognises that “Keynes himself was staunchly anti-Communist, but largely because he felt that capitalism was more likely to drive rapid technological advance that would largely eliminate the need for material labor. He wished for full employment not because he thought work was good, but because he ultimately wished to do away with work, envisioning a society in which technology would render human labor obsolete.”  But Keynes was not just anti-communist because he wanted and expected a leisure not a work society under capitalism.  He went much further than that.  Just read pp94-98 of my book, Marx 200.

The point is that capitalism is not just a ‘money economy’ as Keynesians, and it seems Graeber, think.  It is a money-making economy. You can print money indefinitely, but you cannot turn it into value under capitalism without the exploitation of human labour, or as Coppola would put it, without using ‘the productive capacity of the economy’.  But production, profit and exploitation do not appear in Keynesian analysis, nor in Skidelsky and Graeber’s critique of the mainstream. And yet this is at the heart of capitalism and explains the failure of both neoclassical and Keynesian economics to predict or explain crises under capitalism.

Money theories of crises have one thing in common.  They ignore or deny the law of value, namely that all the things that we need or use in society are the product of human labour power and under a capitalist economy where production is for profit (ie for money over the costs of production), not need, then money represents the socially necessary labour time expended.

But it is a fetish to think that money is something that is outside and separate from value. Graeber appears to have this money fetish. With the money fetish, money replaces value, rather than representing it. Graeber sees money as both causing crises and also as solving them! He ignores the origin and role of profit.  Indeed, his main work sees debt not exploitation as all that is wrong with capitalism. As Mike Biggs explains, for Graeber: “The story of the origins of capitalism, then, is not the story of the gradual destruction of traditional communities by the impersonal power of the market. It is, rather, the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal — and often vindictive — power of the state. And that is Graeber’s explanation for the rise of capitalism. Evil: the root of all money.”  Or perhaps, debt is the root of all evil, not exploitation of the many by the few.

In his review, Graeber raises some key questions for modern economic theory. “The problem of how to determine the optimal distribution of work and resources to create high levels of economic growth is simply not the same problem we are now facing: i.e., how to deal with increasing technological productivity, decreasing real demand for labor, and the effective management of care work, without also destroying the Earth. This demands a different science.”  Really, Marxist political economy would beg to differ. The rise of technology to replace labour and the rapacious destruction of the planet by the drive for profit under capitalism are precisely the issues that the Marx’s laws of value and profitability address and explain.

Instead, Graeber looks to a “new viable science” that “will either have to draw on the accumulated knowledge of feminism, behavioral economics, psychology, and even anthropology to come up with theories based on how people actually behave, or once again embrace the notion of emergent levels of complexity—or, most likely, both.”  Sure, the contributions of various disciplines in social sciences are necessary, but again that is what the historical materialism of Marx’s political economy draws upon, not the fetishes of modern monetary theory or Keynesian ‘animal spirits’.

Milex and the rate of profit

A review of The Economics of Military Spending: A Marxist perspective – by Adem Yavuz Elveren, Routledge, 2019.

Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs published its annual “Costs of War” report last week.  This refers only to the costs of war for the US.  It takes into consideration the Pentagon’s spending and its Overseas Contingency Operations account, as well as “war-related spending by the Department of State, past and obligated spending for war veterans’ care, interest on the debt incurred to pay for the wars, and the prevention of and response to terrorism by the Department of Homeland Security.” The final count revealed, “The United States has appropriated and is obligated to spend an estimated $5.9 trillion (in current dollars) on the war on terror through Fiscal Year 2019, including direct war and war-related spending and obligations for future spending on post 9/11 war veterans.”

The report found that the “US military is conducting counterterror activities in 76 countries, or about 39 percent of the world’s nations, vastly expanding [its mission] across the globe.” In addition, these operations “have been accompanied by violations of human rights and civil liberties, in the US and abroad.”  Overall, researchers estimated that “between 480,000 and 507,000 people have been killed in the United States’ post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.” This toll “does not include the more than 500,000 deaths from the war in Syria, raging since 2011” when a West-backed rebel and jihadi uprising challenged the government, an ally of Russia and Iran. That same year, the U.S.-led NATO Western military alliance intervened in Libya and helped insurgents overthrow long time leader Muammar el-Qaddafi, leaving the nation in an ongoing state of civil war.

Ever since the end of the second world war, there has been some sort of war, between regional powers, or as proxy wars backed by imperialist powers.  The monetary costs of war are huge, as the Watson Brown Institute shows, while the human costs of war are incalculable – not just the deaths and injuries, but also the destruction of homes, livelihoods, deprivation and disease and the horrors of migration.  Wars are a scourge on humanity.

But are they beneficial to the capitalist economy?  That’s another question.  Wars are often seen necessary by governments and politicians to preserve a capitalist power’s control over resources, land, profit etc.  And they are always portrayed by war-mongering governments to their peoples as necessary to ‘save the nation’ or ‘defend our way of life’.  But are wars and military spending that goes with war a necessary cost to deducted from the profits of capital or alternatively an additional boost to making money? That question has been discussed and analysed over the last 150 years by capitalist strategists and Marxist theorists from Engels to Lenin and Luxemburg and on into the 20th century.

However, the costs of military spending have been in decline for most capitalist governments since the end of so-called ‘cold war’ with the Soviet Union.  So interest in whether arms expenditure and wars are beneficial or detrimental to capitalism has also fallen away.  A Marxist perspective on the economic of military spending has been badly neglected – until now.

Adem Yavuz Elveren, Associate Professor at Fitchburg State University in the US, has now rectified that with his new book, simply entitled, The Economics of Military Spending.  As an earlier pioneer in such analysis, Ron Smith of Birkbeck University says in his foreword, Elveren “examines the interaction of military expenditures and the rate of profit and their contribution to capitalist crises.  It not only redirects attention to an increasingly relevant old literature but also makes an original theoretical and empirical contribution to the analysis.”  The book combines theoretical analysis with detailed econometric investigations for 30 countries over last 60 years.

In my opinion, Elveren’s approach is the right way to do political economy or Marxist social science.  Mainstream economic analysis is either boxed into micro-foundation models or generates purely econometric studies based on unrealistic assumptions – or both.  And unfortunately, most Marxist economic analysis is locked into dissecting the meaning of Marx’s writings as dug up and translated from the MEGA or into esoteric academic arguments over the ‘logic of capital’.  While theory is important, it must be tested by empirical evidence or it useless.  And too little of Marxist analysis of capitalism does that.  For example, I am not convinced by the argument that, as there are regular and recurring crises in capitalist production, this proves that capitalism is a failed system.  And that’s all we need to know.  We don’t need to produce empirical data to show that.  But surely, empirical evidence is essential, otherwise we cannot show the causes of these regular crises, and moreover, whether Marx’s own explanation (as there are others) is the most compelling.

No such charge can be laid against Elveren’s book of failing to provide both a theoretical and empirical explanation of the role of military spending in capitalism.  Elveren correctly starts from the basic assertion of Marx that “the driving force of capitalism is profit.”  And so the book “stands at the junction of defence economics and Marxist economics, examining the effect of military expenditure (milex) on the rate of profit, an indicator of the health of a capitalist economy.”

From this perspective, Elveren takes the reader through a brief history of military expenditure and its apparent economic effects.  Then he considers various models of economic growth that connect military spending.  He deals with the theory of ‘military Keynesianism’, popularly presented as an explanation for the fast growth and full employment in the post-war period, the so-called golden age of 20th century capitalism.  And then he gets into the meat of argument by analysing the various versions of the theory of capitalist crises presented under the Marxist banner.

Chapters 4 and 5 are excellent surveys of various Marxist theories of crises from underconsumption, profit squeeze and the Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.  He expertly handles Luxemburg’s view on imperialism and military spending, as well as the Baran-Sweezy thesis of military spending compensating for a stagnating monopoly capitalism – and the so-called ‘permanent arms’ economy idea promoted by Michael Kidron in the post-war period, that capitalism can avoid crises by milex.  If the reader wants to gain knowledge of all these theories of milex and crises without verbiage and confusion, he or she can do no better than read Elveren here.

I have some caveats. Elveren seems to accept the revisionist view of Michael Heinrich that Marx dropped his law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall from the 1870s onwards.  Heinrich argues that the law is wrong and irrelevant to understanding the cause of crises.  I disagree and you can read more about that debate here.  But Elveren’s view is that “Heinrich’s argument seems plausible”; that Marx dropped the idea that the rate of profit must fall over time (namely that the law is a tendency that will eventually overcome countertendencies).  Instead the fall in the rate of profit becomes purely contingent and so whether it falls is just “an empirical question”.

While I disagree with that conclusion, because Elveren does see the law as an empirical question, he can pitch into providing empirical analysis (unlike Heinrich and others). Elveren is fully cognisant of all the empirical work done previously on measuring the rate of profit in the US and elsewhere and it is on this basis that he looks at whether milex will tend to increase or lower the rate of profit and how that affects the capitalist economy in both the short and long term.

The theoretical question at debate in Marxist political economy is whether the production of weapons is productive of value?  The answer is that it must be for the arms producers.  The arms contractors deliver goods (weapons) which are paid for by the government by appropriating value (either present or future). These goods are new use values which have been made under capitalist conditions of production. The labour producing them, therefore, is productive of value and surplus value.

But at the level of the whole economy, arms production is unproductive of future value, in the same way that ‘luxury goods’ for just capitalist consumption are.  Arms production and luxury goods do not re-enter the next production process either as means of production or as means of subsistence for the working class.  While being productive of surplus value for the arms capitalists, the production of weapons is not reproductive and thus threatens the reproduction of capital.  Arms production restricts the volume of use values that can be employed for reproductive purposes.  So if the increase in the overall production of surplus value in an economy slows and the profitability of productive capital begins to fall, then reducing available surplus value for future investment through milex can damage the health of the capitalist accumulation process.

But the outcome depends on the effect on the profitability of capital. The military sector generally has a higher organic composition of capital than the average in an economy as it incorporates leading edge technologies. So the sector would tend to push down the average rate of profit. On the other hand, if taxes collected by the state to pay for arms manufacture are high, then wealth that might otherwise go to labour is distributed to capital and thus can add to available surplus value.  Which way does it go?

To help answer that question, Elveren offers the reader a circuit of capital model to include the military sector based on the model developed by Duncan Foley.  But the question can only be answered empirically.  And this is what Elveren does in the latter part of his book.  He carries out a detailed empirical study to measure the impact of milex against the movement in the rate of profit on capital for most capitalist economies.  This is a far more extensive study than any before.  Elveren uses the Extended Penn World Tables and the Penn World Tables for his cross-country data, as I have done to measure a world rate of profit and rates of profit in individual countries.  As he points out, and as I know only too well, there are many technical problems with these databases and the definitions and assumptions used.  But it is the best we have.

Using his econometric skills, Elveren shows that, overall (from 1963-2008), milex had a positive effect on profit rates in capitalist countries, but that it had a negative effect in the shorter time period – the so-called neo-liberal period from 1980 onwards.  It seems that milex helped to sustain profitability during the great profitability crisis that started in the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, but after that, milex acted against overall profitability in a period when profit rates were rising.

Elveren offers a tentative explanation, “This might be due to the changing structure of major economies in the neo-liberal era. With the rise of the financial sector and the rentier class, the rising share of profits earned by firms has begun to be used for interest payments, dividends and other unproductive expenditure, causing a smaller faction of profit to be invested in capital stock.”  This explanation may be too simple, bearing in mind work by Campbell and Bakir and myself – see my recent post.

But anyway, it seems that the productive sectors of capitalist economies had insufficient surplus value to invest at the previous pace as capitalists switched to financial speculation where profitability was higher.  Military spending then became just another negative.  Milex may have had a mildly positive effect on profit rates in arms exporting countries but not for arms importing ones.  In the latter, milex was a deduction from available profits for productive investment.

Over the period 1963-08, Elveren finds that milex, as a stimulant to capital accumulation (with its high-level technology) was mildly positive in the US, but in other major countries it has a negative effect, particularly in those countries that imported their arms.  In all countries milex was damaging for employment as a whole, as the arms sector used less labour on average.  Thus milex may sometimes help the rate of profit for capital but the flipside is that milex will increase the ‘reserve army of labour’.  And as Elveren adds “the effect of milex may change at different levels of the rate of profit”.

So Elveren’s empirical work appears to back up the Marxist view of the role of military spending in a capitalist economy.  It can act to lower the rate of profit on capital and thus on economic growth as it did in the neo-liberal period, when investment and economic growth slowed.  But it can also help bolster the rate of profit through state’s redistribution of value from labour to capital, when labour is forced to pay more in taxation, or the state borrows more, in order to boost investment and production in the military sector.

In the greater scheme of things, milex is not decisive for the health of the capitalist economy.  At its height, its share in GDP reached an average of 13%.  But that was due to the Korean war.  Even during the cold war period, that share fell by half to around 6% of GDP.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, military spending in the major imperialist powers halved again to 3%.  Milex is not going to decide the future of capital, one way or the other.  But thanks to Elveren’s work, we have a much clearer picture of the economics of war and military spending beneath the horrors of its outcomes.

HM3: the profits-investment puzzle

The other session at the Historical Materialism London conference that I participated in was on The Relation between Profits, Investment and Crises.  This was organised by Al Campbell from the University of Utah. In his paper, Al outlined how in the last two decades a gap opened up between the growth in profitability and the rate of investment and accumulation (Al Campbell).  Al showed that the share of investment in total US profits fell from the early 2000s until the Great Recession and still stands well below the average share in the 1980s and 1990s.

So what was going on after 2000?  Al strips out profits that were distributed as dividends to shareholders and interest to lenders and bond holders to expose retained earnings and finds that “the answer (and it is an answer as far as it goes) – the amount of real investment tracks retained profits. Retained profits have fallen as a share of profits, and so real investment has fallen correspondingly.”

But why has there been such a reduction in retained profits for productive investment and an increase in the share of profits going in dividends and interest?  And what do the shareholders and bondholders do with their share?  Do they spend it (capitalist consumption) or do they save it (in cash) or do they re-invest it (financial assets)?

From the data, Al reckons the reduction in the share of retained profits is not because interest costs have risen (interest rates are at all-time lows) or because companies pay more to shareholders.  More likely, it is because the profitability of productive investment has stayed low so there is an ’over-investment’ of productive capital and the unused profits are either hoarded as cash by companies, or distributed in increased dividends and more recently used in huge share buyback programmes to drive up the prices of company stock.

Al asked the question: is there empirical evidence to explain this profit-investment gap?  Well, I think there is some.  I raised the same puzzle in a paper to HM London 2016, The Great Recession: a Marx not a Minsky moment.  (Marx not Minsky) This is what I said then: “Usually, US corporations have invested more than they had available in corporate savings.  The only period that this was not the case is 2000-07.  But note, corporate savings between 2000-7 did not grow faster (5.3% pa) than in other periods.  What happened was that capex grew much more slowly (4.0%).  That suggests that corporate savings were switched into financial rather than productive investment.”

There clearly is some cash hoarding.  But this hoarding was concentrated in the large tech companies, which either kept this cash abroad to avoid tax and/or increased bond issuance on the back of these assets.  At the start of the credit crisis in 2007, companies with more than $2.5bn each in cash and near cash items, such as short-term investments, held 76 per cent of the $1.98tn of cash reserves of the non-financial members of the S&P 1200.  By the third quarter of 2013, this had risen to 82 per cent (of a total $2.8tn), the highest percentage since before 2000. Of non-financial companies in the S&P Global 1200 index, just 8.4 per cent hold 50 per cent of the cash.  Indeed, 40% of companies actually reduced their cash balances. Most small to medium size have no cash piles. Indeed, as I showed in that 2016 paper, cash as a share of total corporate financial assets is not particularly high historically.

The switch is from productive assets to financial assets.  I found in the 2016 paper, that there appears to be a surplus of corporate savings over investment in capex from about 2000 (red line in graph below). However, when you add in financial asset investment (green line), there is a huge deficit (net borrowing), which takes off at the end of the 1990s.  So non-financial companies increasingly borrowed to speculate (often in their own shares) and not invest productively.

Alan Freeman, a leading Marxist economist, attempts to answer the same question in a new paper.
Rate_of_profit_investment_and_the_causes (1)
Alan poses: “If American and British companies only invest the minority of their surplus, what do they do with the rest? Do they keep it in the form of money – a classic form of crisis?  Do they invest it abroad – a classic form of imperialism; Do they invest it in financial assets – ie saleable monetary instruments?”  Freeman reckons it must be a combination of all those. But “in any case, they don’t use it to boost new production.”  Here Freeman shows that rise in the purchase of US financial assets compared to productive assets.

Freeman suggests that there has been a switch to holding financial assets (shares and bonds) rather than investing in productive assets because “the lower the productive rate (of profit), the larger the proportion that remains in the form of currency or financial assets.” And Alan goes on to show that rates of profit in Europe, the US and Japan have continued to fall if you include financial assets.

In a recent post, I too made similar points and offered up some empirical work from other scholars on this puzzle. Also, I have recently used the KLEMS database to calculate the profitability of the US productive sector. Between 1987 and 1997, the profitability of the productive sector rose 12%, then fell sharply, provoking the mini-recession of 2001.  Profitability then recovered to previous levels by 2004.  But then four years of decline led into the Great Recession. The recovery in profitability after the slump of 2008-9 was weak and started to fall as early as 2011.  This can explain the weak investment in productive activities in the period after 2009 that I call the Long Depression.

I have argued on this blog that the profitability of capital is key to gauging whether the capitalist economy is in a healthy state or not. If profitability persistently falls, then eventually the growth in the mass of profits will slow and even fall absolutely and that is the trigger for a collapse in investment and a slump.  This was the basis of my own paper in this session, on the Profits-Investment nexus. Profits-Investment Nexus

In my view, the Marxian theory of crises is based on the movement of business investment.  A fall in investment, not consumption, is the swing factor in generating a crisis of overproduction and a slump.  Keynesians and post-Keynesians might (partially) agree. But they think that business investment decisions depend on ‘uncertainty’, ‘confidence’ or so-called ‘animal spirits’.

In contrast, Marx starts his analysis of capitalism with the discovery of surplus value through the exploitation of labour.  Profit is thus the driving force of capitalist accumulation.  What drives business investment is profitability, profits and the expectation of profits, not ‘animal spirits’. And what the profit-investment puzzle of the last two decades reveals is that it is the rate of profit in productive investment that matters.  If it is low or is falling, then capital switches abroad, or hoards cash or invests in financial assets (what Marx called fictitious capital).  If companies borrow to do so, then a credit bubble inflates, which bursts when profits in productive assets fall.

In the session, Bucknell University’s Erdogan Bakir provided powerful support for this theory of crises. (erdogan bakir) As Erdogan quotes James Crotty in his paper: “Marx theorizes the increasing fragility, vulnerability or sensitivity of the contract-credit system in the mature expansion. As the expansion overheats, the ability to fulfill contractual obligations will be increasingly threatened by any significant decline in the gross rate of profit.”  Bakir identifies a profit cycle where profitability rises, then Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall kicks in, and profitability falls back. He identifies 11 such cycles in the US post-war economy.

 

Eventually, the share of profit in total output falls, creating the conditions for a slump in investment and production.  So it goes from the rate to the mass (this follows closely my thesis presented in the debate with Professor David Harvey at this year’s HM – see my post on HM1).

In the boom part of the cycle, production and investment rise and interest rates are low to encourage credit. But in the later part of that cycle, interest rates rise, corporate debt reaches highs and profitability starts to fall.  Thus, there is a scissor effect on capitalist investment.

The current cycle since 2009 has been the longest post-war cycle in the US and profitability has fallen since 2014, the longest period of decline.  The US economy is now in its late part of the current cycle.  But meanwhile, the stock market booms – way out of line with corporate profits.  Another recession is overdue.

What this HM session suggested is that the next recession has been delayed because of the unprecedented expansion of fictitious capital since 2000 as central banks push down interest rates to zero and implemented huge injections of money into the banks.  Companies have relied on fictitious profits from rising share and bond prices while profitability in productive investment (even overseas) remained low and falling.  But this contradiction cannot last, if Erdogan Bakir’s thesis of the profit cycle holds.

Every year, HM hears an address from the winner of the Deutscher Memorial prize “for a book which exemplifies the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition”.  Last year, the winner was Kohei Saito, associate professor of political economy at Osaka University, for his book on Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital,Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. I missed his address but I’ll try and review that book in the near future.  This year’s winner, announced after the conference, was Brett Christophers from Uppsala University, Sweden with his book, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain.  Again, I shall try and review that book soon.

Finally, there were many other sessions at HM on all sorts of subjects and issues, including others on Marxist political economy.  But I had no time to attend these. The three posts on HM are the best that I could do.

HM2 – The economics of modern imperialism

At the Historical Materialism conference, the Saturday discussion between Professor David Harvey and myself on Marx’s double-edge law attracted more than 250 people.  Sunday’s session on the economics of modern imperialism that I had organised also attracted a good turnout of around 60 people, many of which were clearly experts on the subject.  Unfortunately for them, the four speakers (including myself) went over their allotted times and used up the available discussion time – apologies all round!

Anyway, at least the speakers presented some important arguments.  I spoke last.  But I think in this post, I shall outline my presentation first because I think it sets the scene for the others.  G Carchedi and I have been working on some new empirical work, trying to gauge which countries are the imperialist ones and how much value they are able to extract from the dominated or periphery (we prefer those names rather than ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’, which is too geographical).  We emphasise that we are looking at the economic foundations of imperialism, not the political aspects or the superstructure if you like, ie the political control by imperialist countries over the periphery, or military might or interventions etc.  Direct political control through colonies has mostly disappeared (although not completely); so imperialism operates mainly through economic control now (while throwing in the occasional coup or proxy war).  After all, that is the aim of the imperialist powers: to appropriate as much value and resources from the dominated as possible. In that sense, the economic determines the political.

If we focus on the transfer of value from the periphery to the imperialist economies, there are several ways that this is achieved. There is value transfer through unequal exchange in international trade; through global value chain flows (transfer pricing) within multi-nationals; through factor income flows (debt interest, equity profits and property rents); through seignorage (ie control of the money supply: dollar is king) and through capital flows (foreign direct investment inflows and portfolio flows. ie buying and selling financial assets).

So which are the imperialist countries?  Carchedi and I define them as those countries which get a long-term appropriation of value from subaltern countries.  And this is achieved by the appropriation of surplus value by high technology companies (and countries) from low technology companies (countries).  So imperialist countries can be defined as those with a persistently large number of companies as measured by their high national average organic composition of capital (OCC) and whose average technological development is higher than the national average of other countries.

In our work, we used the IMF data on net primary income flows between countries. These are cross-border flows of profit, interest and rent.  We found that when these flows are netted out, there are about 10 countries at the most that fit the bill as imperialist.  Indeed, nothing much has changed in the 100 years since Lenin wrote his analysis of imperialism: it’s still the same countries.  No others have made it from dominated to imperialist status.  Net primary income per head is concentrated in the G7 plus a few other small states and the tiny tax haven states).  Every other country is an ‘also-ran’.

The G8-plus countries own the vast bulk of all the foreign-owned assets.  Even the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) own little abroad compared to the imperialist countries.  The G8 has six times as much FDI stock as the BRICS.

The main way that value is transferred from the periphery to the imperialist nations is still through international trade. There has been a large increase in intra-firm trade by affiliates to the parent company using price mark-ups (transfer pricing).  For example, UNCTAD reckons that trans-national companies (TNCs) are involved in 80% of global trade. And of TNC trade, about 40% is intra-firm; 15% through fixed contracts with suppliers and 40% with so-called arms-length firms (ie not owned affiliates but ‘captive’ domestic firms). Actual intra-firm trade (affiliates to parent company) is about 33% of all annual trade.  So the main way is still export trade on world markets with internationally set prices.(UNCTAD GVC)

In Capital, Marx shows that, through competition, there is a tendency for the profit rates measured in value (labour time) to equalise into prices of production. There is a transfer of value from some capitals to others to bring about this equalisation of profit rates.  This transfer process in competition also applies to international trade. The transfer of value from the dominated to the imperialist economies is achieved by the tendency to equalise rates of profit between nations in the international market for goods and capital.

The periphery has less technology and more labour and so produces more value (in labour time) to make the same product.  The imperialist countries have more technology and less labour and so produce less value (in labour time).  When profit rates are equalised through competition in world markets, then a portion of the extra surplus value that has been extracted from the workers by the capitalists in the South gets transferred to the capitalists of the North.  So, although international trade in goods and services appears to work through equality of exchange (money for goods, goods for money at set prices), beneath the surface, there is an unequal exchange of value (UE).  The imperialist capitals gain extra value while the peripheral capitalists lose value. Figure 13 of my PP presentation shows how this transfer of value works. (The economics foundations of imperialism)

Carchedi and I have made calculations of the magnitude of this transfer of value.  We used some aggregate databases and applied a formula for the transfer. Details of this are in Figure 14 of the PP presentation and excel files are available for anybody who wants to replicate and check our methods and workings.  We found that the transfer of value from the dependent bloc (defined as below) to the G7 rose from $20bn a year in the 1960s; to $90bn in the 1970s, dropping off to $50bn in the 1980s. Then with China becoming the great trading force, there was a take-off from the late 1990s to reach over $120bn by the time of the Great Recession.

So there is annual value transfer from these countries to the G7 through their international trade of $120bn or more a year. This annual transfer of value to the imperialist countries (G7) is equivalent to about 2-3% of their combined GDP.  But the transfer from the dominated countries is much more, around 10% of their combined GDP.  So there is a substantial transfer out of the South through unequal exchange.

Recently, other authors have tried to compute the magnitude of the transfer of value to imperialist countries. Using the World Input-Output database, Italian economist Andrea Ricci of Urbino University, Italy found that for the developed countries “the global amount of value transfers corresponded to 1.8 percent of global value added… while for developing economies, the relative size of outflow transfers ranged from 10 to 20 percent of the domestic value added.” Ricci unequal exchange And Greek Marxist economists, Lefteris Tsoulfidis and Persefoni Tsaliki, looked at the transfer of value in trade between the US and China.  They find a similar magnitude of bilateral transfer of value between the US and China as we do. URPE_CHN_2019

In our view, based on the Marxian theory of unequal exchange, the transfer of value from the periphery to the imperialist countries through international trade and competition takes place because the imperialist countries have a much higher organic composition of capital.  That expresses their technological superiority and delivers much higher labour productivity.  The G7 economies on average are five times more technologically superior than the BRICS and so four times more productive per worker.

This is where the other speakers at the session come in.  John Smith is author of the highly commended, award-winning book, Imperialism in the 21st century.  The book’s main argument is that imperialism rests and thrives on the ‘super-exploitation’ of workers in the ‘Global South’.

What do we mean by ‘super-exploitation’? Well, Marx referred briefly to the idea that some workers may end up receiving wages that are below the value of their labour power (the amount needed to live and reproduce). But he did not base his theory of surplus value on ‘super-exploitation’. For Marx, even without super-exploitation, workers were still exploited for surplus value and profit under capitalism.

However, John Smith reckons that super-exploitation is now the main generator of imperialist value gains in the 21st century and technological superiority and ‘normal’ exploitation are no longer in the driving seat, so to speak. For John, this is almost self-evident, given the incredibly low wages in the sweatshops of many Global South countries and the huge mark-ups in the global value chain for imperialist multi-nationals.  Anybody who denied this and argued that workers in the North were just as or even more exploited would be denying the very existence of imperialism.

At the HM session, Andy Higginbottom from Kingston University provided some of the theoretical support for  the thesis of ‘super-exploitation’ as the economic driver of imperialism (HM 2019 Labour super-exploitation plus transformation makes for international value (1).  He pointed out that Marx’s transfer of value model as shown in our PP Figure 13 assumed equal rates of surplus value. That clearly could not be reality. If you relaxed that restriction, then different rates of surplus value between imperialist and peripheral economies come into play in the transfer of value, and not just differing rates of organic composition and labour productivity.  And then it can be argued that the rate of exploitation is not just affected by labour intensity, productivity etc, but also by differences in wages (ie super-exploitation).

But I don’t think Marx’s theory of unequal exchange must assume equal rates of surplus value in all countries.  In Figure 20 of our presentation, we show that value is transferred from South to North through trade in the same way even with differing rates of exploitation; indeed if the rates of surplus value are higher in the South, then the North gains even more value in the transfer. But the Southern capitalists also gain more, because they are exploiting their workers even more, either by longer hours and intensity and/or by poverty wages.

The point is that the transfer to the North takes place because of the imperialist countries’ superior technology and labour productivity.  That enables them to sell their goods in world markets at costs below the international average.  The Southern capitalists try to compensate for their lower technical level and productivity by driving the wages of their workers down. So the higher rate of exploitation in the South, whether by super-exploitation or not, is a reaction to the failure to compete against the North.

In our empirical analysis, we found that the contributions to the transfer of value from South to North came from both higher organic composition in the North and higher rates of exploitation in the South – it is both, not just technical superiority, nor just exploitation. But there is also a transfer of value between imperialist countries through trade.  And indeed, competition there remains fierce.  The annual flows of FDI show that, until very recently, flows between advanced capitalist economies were higher than between the imperialist and the less developed South.  In the decade from 2007, inflows to developed economies exceeded inflows to developing economies.  Last year was the first reversal of that.

In his paper for the HM session, Smith developed an analysis of the rate of exploitation (s/v).  Exploitation and super-exploitation in the theory of imperialism.  He reminds us that Marx recognised a so-called ‘moral and historical’ component in the value of labour-power, i.e. “the extent to which the class struggle and general social evolution (different ways of saying the same thing) has resulted in the incorporation of new needs into those necessary for the reproduction of labour-power.”

That means that the value of labour power is partly set by the class struggle. But super exploitation is not part of Marx’s theory of value, or s/v.  In the process of production, capitalists might force a lower wage. If the necessities of life and their production prices remain the same, the lower wage purchases less wage goods (consumption falls) as the price of labour power (wages) falls below its value (the production price of those socially determined necessities). That is super exploitation.  But if this low wage is maintained permanently, workers must eventually accept a lower value of labour power in the goods and services that they can buy with it.  In that sense, super exploitation becomes simply a higher level or rate of (“normal”) exploitation because the value of labour power has been lowered by the class struggle. Yes, there is more exploitation, but not ‘super-exploitation’ as a new category of capital.

So I don’t think that super-exploitation is proven either theoretically or empirically as “the single-most important means of increasing the rate of surplus value and countering the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.” (Smith).  Or that imperialism has an “insatiable lust for super-exploitable labour”.  Imperialism has a lust for profit and is the result of the drive for more profit beyond national borders as the rate of profit at ‘home’ fell.  Denying the dominance of super-exploitation as the main form of exploitation under imperialism is not “imperialism denial”, like global warming or climate change denial, as Smith suggests.

Moreover, it just might be that the days of ‘super-exploitation’, as Smith categorises it, are ending.  At the launch of a new book at HM, Ashok Kumar, a lecturer in International Political Economy at Birkbeck University, argued that there are signs that the ‘monopsony’ power of the imperialist buyers of the products of suppliers in the global South is weakening because the number of producers is also shrinking.  This increases the countervailing power of the Southern capitalists (producers) against the Northern capitalists (retailers).  And that gives a window of opportunity for the workers of the Southern sweat shops to push up wages through successful struggles – of which Kumar gives examples.

While it is possible to argue any super exploitation of the workers in the low technology countries (the so-called “South) is caused by the technological backwardness of the South’s capitalists, it is impossible to argue the opposite; that this technological backwardness is caused by super exploitation. And if super exploitation is determined, it cannot be the main determinant element. In sum, the productivity of labour is key to the transfer of value in trade between imperialist countries and the periphery. The major cause of UE is technological superiority. Differences in the rates of surplus value are significant but play a lesser role. Exclusive emphasis on only one of these two factors is misleading.

Moreover, even it were the case that super-exploitation is the main cause of higher rates of surplus value in the peripheral economies, a transfer of value has to take place.  And that can only go to countries with vastly superior technology and labour productivity and can maintain that superiority through monopolising that technology.  Indeed, that was one of the arguments made by Sam King, from Victoria University Australia, at the HM session, based on his upcoming book on imperialism.

Sam reckoned that Lenin’s Imperialism was still valid.  There were still only a few countries reaping these value transfers.  Although Lenin refers to ‘monopoly capital, he did not mean that there was no competition between capitals. Competition still took place voraciously between various imperialist economies but also with ‘Southern’ capitalists. The monopoly was in the technical superiority of the imperialist companies, which they jealously guarded.  The labour productivity gap between these countries and the periphery had not altered since Lenin’s time.  Now in the 21st century, the US is worried that its technology ‘monopoly’ may be threatened by China’s move up the value-added ladder. This is the real reason for the current trade war.

The empirical evidence shows that imperialism is an inherent feature of modern capitalism. Capitalism’s international system mirrors its national system (a system of exploitation): exploitation of less developed economies by the more developed ones. The imperialist countries of the 20th century are unchanged – it’s still the G7/10. There are no intermediate, ‘sub-imperialist’ economies. And China is not imperialist on these measures. And the transfer of value from the periphery to the imperialist core is continually rising.

Finally, Marx’s model of unequal exchange shows that the economics of imperialism works through the transfer of value by the exploitation of the workers of the South by the capitalists of the South and then through the transfer of some of that surplus value appropriated to the capitalists of the North in international markets and internal global value chains. The workers of the North do not benefit in any way from this imperialist transfer.

To suggest, as some do, that the welfare state, pensions and national health services in the North were only possible because of the imperialist exploitation of the South is economic nonsense. After all, the great period of imperialist exploitation was in the neo-liberal period of globalization since the 1980s, when the welfare and wage gains of workers in the North were taken back.  Globalisation of the late 20th century was a response to falling rates of profit in the North (as it was in the late 19th century).  It is also a political insult against the class struggles made by Northern workers to achieve those gains in the first place.  Both the workers of the South and the North are exploited by capital.  It is capital that is the enemy of both.

HM1 – Marx’s double-edge law

This year’s Historical Materialism (HM) conference in London was apparently attended by over 850 people with some 400-plus papers presented over three days.  HM brings together radical and Marxist academics and activists to discuss and debate issues covering the spectrum of socialist issues: philosophy, culture, science, history and economics. This year’s theme was on climate change and ‘extinction’. But as usual, this blog will concentrate on the Marxian economics sessions and, within that, only those sessions at which I presented or attended, and thus only scratching the surface.

My first presentation was to help launch a new revised version of Invisible Leviathan, a book by Professor Murray Smith of Brock University, Ontario, Canada. Postgraduate student Josh Watterton also added some new insights on the empirical work on the US rate of profit too.  Murray Smith’s book is a must read for those who want to understand Marx’s law of value (the ‘invisible leviathan’) and get a clear rebuttal of all the distortions and mistakes made by Marxists and others about the law since Marx died.  I have reviewed this book before and wrote a foreword to the new edition.  You can read that here.  And Josh Watterton’s work will soon be available too.  So I won’t go any further in reviewing that session.

Instead in this post, I want to concentrate on my second session, namely the discussion between me and Professor David Harvey.  David Harvey (DH) is one of the world’s pre-eminent geographers and a prolific writer of books and articles on Marxian economic theory, as well as on the structure and trends in modern capitalism. For his latest view on that, see his book  Capital and the Madness of economic reason.

Over the years, DH and I have debated and discussed issues on Marx’s law of value and his law of profitability.  DH rejects the view that Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (LRTPF) has much to do with changes in a capitalist economy or as a cause of crises.  He has criticised me and others who hold that view of being ‘monocausal’ ie obsessed with one cause when crises are the result a multiplicity of causes. He also thrown doubt on whether Marx’s law is logically valid, empirically supported and even if Marx continued to support it in his later years.  I won’t go over old ground here and you can read these various issues on my blog in many posts.

On this occasion, DH entitled his presentation, Marx’s ‘Double-Edged Law’ of the Falling Rate of Profit and the Rising Mass of Profit.  DH kindly sent me an unfinished paper of his that outlined the argument he was going to make.  The gist of it was that many Marxists pay too much attention to the rate of profit in looking at capitalism and not what is happening with the mass of profit.  And yet Marx’s law is double-edged.  Marx spells it out in Volume One of Capital: “despite the enormous decline in the general rate of profit…the number of workers employed by capital i.e. the absolute mass of labour set in motion by it, hence the absolute mass of the surplus labour absorbed, appropriated by it, hence the mass of surplus value it produces, hence the absolute magnitude or mass of the profit produced by it, can therefore grow, and progressively so, despite the progressive fall in the rate of profit.” He then adds: “this not only can, but must be the case…. The same laws “produce both a growing absolute mass of profit, which the social capital appropriates, and a falling rate of profit.” And then Marx asks:  How, then should we present this double-edged law of a decline in the rate of profit coupled with a simultaneous increase in the absolute mass of profit arising from the same causes?”

Thus DH argues that it is really the mass of profit and capital that we must look at for an indication of what is happening in a modern capitalist economy.  At the HM session, DH pointed out examples of why mass was more important than the rate of change in the mass.

Quantitative easing (an expansion of the mass of money supply) used by central banks since the end of the global financial crash to save the financial system and the economy with floods of money was one example.  Central banks were using ‘mass’ rather than rate (interest rate).  But this had only benefited the rich through the stock and bond markets.

Then there was climate change. So large had annual carbon emissions reached (over 400ppm) that the rate of increase was increasingly irrelevant; the damage was already done and cutting back the mass was now the issue.

On the economic front, DH pointed out that world GDP had doubled in real terms every 25 years and so even slow growth in GDP was less important to analyse than the sheer size of annual output and use of resources.  China was now sucking up the world’s natural resources fast and producing cement at astronomical levels; not because it was growing fast (growth is slowing) but because China was now so large (mass).

These were very imaginative insights by DH.  But disconcertingly for me, he made no further explanation of this theme in relation to Marx’s law of profitability (LTRPF) or for that matter the double-edged nature of Marx’s law as expressed above.  I had prepared a detailed response to the arguments in his paper, most of which he had not mentioned in his address.  But I decided to plough on regardless and try to answer his new critique of what I called the work of ‘we falling rate of profit boys and girls’ (and there are girls).

As Marx explained and DH quoted, the LTRPF has a double-edge.  As the rate of profit falls in a capitalist economy, it is perfectly possible, indeed likely, that the mass of profit will rise.  It’s arithmetical really: a falling rate still implies a rising mass.  But a double-edge cuts both ways.  As Marx goes on to explain in Volume 3 of Capital (chapter 13).  “The two movements not only go hand in hand, but mutually influence one another and are phenomena in which the same law expresses itself….. there would be absolute over-production of capital as soon as additional capital for purposes of capitalist production = 0.   at a point, therefore, when the increased capital produced just as much, or even less, surplus-value than it did before its increase, there would be absolute over-production of capital; i.e., the increased capital C + ΔC would produce no more, or even less, profit than capital C before its expansion by ΔC.”  So the mass of profit can and will rise as the rate of profit falls, keeping capitalist investment and production going.  But as the rate of profit falls, the increase in the mass of profit will eventually fall to the point of ‘absolute over-accumulation’, the tipping point for crises.

And it is not true that the LTRPF supporters ignore this double edge law. On the contrary, the most important exponent of the LTRPF in the 1920s, who virtually revived this theory of crisis against alternatives, Henryk Grossman, built his whole theory around the double-edge law and what happened to the mass of profit as the rate of profit fell.  I quote: “Not only does the rate of profit fall but the rate of growth of the mass of profit …. also falls behind the rate of growth of the total value of production.  So a point is eventually reached when the increase in mass of profit is not large enough to cover the projected increase in investment, which is growing at a higher rate. The rate of profit cannot, therefore, fall indefinitely. Whatever the rate of accumulation assumed in the model, the rate of profit eventually declines to a level at which the mass of surplus value is not great enough to sustain that rate of accumulation (Grossmann 1929b p. 103, Grossmann 1932a pp. 331-332). It was this mechanism, which he saw as intrinsic to the process of capital accumulation, that Grossman regarded as ‘the decisively important’ factor in Marx’s theory of economic crisis and breakdown (Grossmann 1929b p. 183).

Grossman spent a large part of his masterpiece creating tables showing how the rate and mass of profit affect each other and so ended up with a crisis based on insufficient profit to sustain further investment.  The table below gives you a simple arithmetic version from me.

Here we have two capitals, one Big ($100) and one Small ($10).  The whole economy totals 100+10 = 110.  There is an average rate of profit that applies to both capitals.  I start this at 10% and reduce in each following year. The rate of profit falls but the mass of profit (the profit for big and small capitals combined) rises each year.  So that by year 9 the mass of profit is $132.8 compared to $100 at the start of year 1.  But note that the rise in the mass of profit is falling towards zero.  Indeed, the growth in profits for the small capital in absolute dollars is infinitesimal by year 9.  And with a slowing rise in the mass of profit, investment will also slow and Grossman argues would eventually stop, triggering a crisis of production.

This is a very unrealistic example, however.  In the example, the rate of profit falls from 10% to nearly zero.  That does not happen in any capitalist economy.  So let us consider a real example.

Here we have the actual figures for the US rate of profit and the mass of profit (as calculated by me – see my post Measuring the US rate of profit in 2018) leading up to the Great Recession.  The rate of profit rises from 2002 to 2006 and then starts to fall, reaching a trough in 2009.  The mass of profit also rises but then contracts in 2007 (one year later than the rate) and in 2008 coinciding with the Great Recession.  So the falling rate of profit eventually takes the mass of profit down, leading to an investment collapse and a slump in capitalist production.  Marx’s double-edge law.

This is seen much more clearly when we use quarterly figures for the mass of profit, investment and GDP.  The graph below comes from Chapter 1 of the book World in Crisis (2018), edited by G Carchedi and me.

The mass of corporate profits peaks in mid-2006; while business investment and GDP follow 18 months later.  The mass of profits starts to recover at the end of 2008 but the Great Recession only ends in mid-2009 when investment and GDP recover.  Profits lead investment, and the rate of profit leads the mass.

And in every US recession since the war, it is broadly the same.  The rate of profit falls before each recession from a peak by between 6-20% and the (growth) in the mass of profit then drops by 5-12% points.  The mass of profits may not go negative (although it did before the Great Recession) but it slows considerably, causing an investment strike by capital.

This is not really surprising.  If company management see their profits or earnings slowing, they reduce their investment expansion and employment hiring and even reverse it.

Indeed, we ‘falling rate of profit boys and girls’ have been well aware of Marx’s double-edge law, even if DH has only just discovered its importance.  For example, in our World in Crisis book, in one chapter, Jose Tapia from Drexel University, shows the close connection between the changes in the mass of US corporate profits and investment, leading to successive crises.  As Tapia concludes from his empirical analysis: “the evidence is quite overwhelming that profits peak several quarters before the recession.  Then profits recover before investment does as illustrated by the investment trough that occurs around the end of the recession or the start of the expansion, but following the profit trough for at least a few quarters.”  And G Carchedi in another chapter in that book shows that when total new value (mass) in a capitalist economy starts to fall along with a fall in the rate of profit and employment, a slump in production follows.

DH commented in the discussion that I and other LTRPF exponents only ever seem to concentrate on the US for data and ignore other countries.  Anybody who reads World in Crisis will find analyses from scholars on the US, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Spain, the UK, China and Japan.  At HM itself there was a paper that looked at the LTRPF and the mass of profit in Finland (see HM programme Friday)!  In addition, there are studies on Sweden, Germany, Italy, Korea and South Africa.

In the session, DH brought to our attention the importance at looking at the mass or size of things and not just the rate of change.  That is undoubtedly useful.  But I think DH’s purpose was also to weaken belief in the role of Marx’s law of profitability and its relevance to crises.  By bringing up the double-edge law, it seems to me, DH was saying that a rising mass of profit or capital stock or GDP is the problem. And thus the problem for capitalism is not insufficient profit due to a falling rate but too much surplus due to rising mass.  How are we going to absorb or cope with ‘too much’ is the problem.

This connects with DH’s view that crises under capitalism arise because of too much capital or profit relative to the ability of consumers to use it.  Indeed, DH argues that it is consumer confidence and the level of consumption that matters in triggering crises not the rate or level of profits and investment. But the evidence on that does not support DH’s thesis as I have shown before.

In every US recession since 1945, it has not been a fall in household consumption levels that has emerged before a slump, but a fall in business investment levels.  Consumption may be 70% of US GDP on official accounts (it is actually much less), but it is the 15-20% of GDP in capital investment that is the swing factor in causing slumps.  Consumption hardly drops – because households have to go on paying for energy, food and basics, running up debts and running down savings.

It was argued from the floor in the debate that consumption has stayed up because households borrowed (particularly mortgages for housing) in the neoliberal period, and when that borrowing got too high, then the house of cards collapsed and this caused the Great Recession.  This thesis was expounded by several post-Keynesians and mainstream economists like Mian and Sufi in their book, House of Debt.  It has been dealt with by me in other posts, so I won’t go into it now.

Marx’s double-edge law of profit is actually the basis of the profit cycle that leads to boom and slump and then boom again in capitalist economies – as I show in this graph that I use often.

Starting at the top, the capitalist economy booms but the rate of profit falls; then as we go clockwise, the rate of profit eventually slows the rise in the mass of profit and then leads to the fall in investment.  At the bottom that triggers a financial and credit collapse.  Then once the costs of capital and labour have been reduced through the laying off labour, merging companies and liquidating weak ones, the survivors can start the process again, as the rate and mass of profit rises again.

DH rejects Marx’s law of profitability as the underlying cause of crises in favour what he has called a multiplicity of causes.  He accuses those who focus on Marx’s rate of profit law as being ‘monocausal’.  But he finds it difficult to refute the empirical evidence of a falling rate of profit.  So now he has moved the goal posts from the rate to the mass.  But shifting the goalposts just leaves us with a new goal to score in.  Marx’s double edge law is not a refutation of the law of profitability as the underlying cause of crises; on the contrary, it is the foundation.  And alternative causes (like underconsumption, ‘too much surplus to absorb’, disproportion, financial fragility etc) remain unconvincing and unproven in comparison.

My next post on HM will cover the session on the economics of modern imperialism.

US rate of profit measures for 2018

Every year, I look at measuring the US rate of profit a la Marx.  Official data are now available in order to update the measurement for 2018 (not 2019 yet!). As usual, if you wish to replicate my results, I again refer you to the excellent manual for doing so, kindly compiled by Anders Axelsson from Sweden. 

There are many ways to measure the rate of profit a la Marx (for the various ways, see http://pinguet.free.fr/basu2012.pdf). As previously, I start with an update of the measure used by Andrew Kliman (AK) in his book, The failure of capitalist production. AK measures the US rate of profit based on corporate sector profits only for the numerator and uses the historic cost measure of net fixed assets as the denominator (ie s/C).  AK considers this measure as the closest to Marx’s formula, namely that the rate of profit should be based on the advanced capital already bought (thus historic costs) and not on the current cost of replacing that capital.

Marx approaches value theory temporally so the value of the denominator in the rate of profit formula is at t1 and should not be changed to the value at t2. To do the latter is ‘simultaneism’, leading to a distortion of Marx’s value theory.  For more on this, see AK’s book, Reclaiming Marx’s Capital.  This seems correct to me. But the debate on this issue of measurement continues and can be found in the appendix in my book, The Long Depression, on measuring the rate of profit.

What are the results of the AK version for the US rate of profit up to 2018?

First, the AK measure confirms Marx’s law in that there has been a secular decline in the US rate of profit since 1946 (27%) and since 1965 (31%).  But also interesting is that, on AK’s measure, the rate of profit in the US corporate sector has risen since the trough of 2001 (17%).  Indeed, the Great Recession of 2009 did not see a fall below that 2001 trough. So the 2000s appear to contradict the view of a ‘persistent’ fall in the US rate of profit. I’ll consider some explanations for this later in this post.  But even so, on AK’s measure, the US rate of profit has not returned to the level of 2006 and in 2018 is some 18% below.

Readers of my blog and other papers know that I prefer to measure the rate of profit by looking at total surplus value in an economy against total private capital employed in production; to be as close as possible to Marx’s original formula of s/C+v. So I have a ‘whole economy’ measure based on total national income (less depreciation) for surplus value; net non-residential private fixed assets for constant capital; and adding in employee compensation for variable capital (AK does not do this).  This is what might be called a general rate of profit.

Most Marxist measures exclude any measure of variable capital on the grounds that employee compensation (wages plus benefits) is not a stock of invested capital but a flow of circulating capital.  And this cannot be measured (easily) from available data. I don’t agree that this is a restriction and G Carchedi and I have an unpublished work on this point.  However, given that the value of constant fixed capital compared to variable capital is five to eight times larger (depending on whether you use a historic or current cost measure), the addition of a measure of variable capital to the denominator does not change the trend or turning points in the rate of profit significantly. This also applies to the rest of circulating capital ie. inventories (the stock of unfinished and intermediate goods). They should and could be added as circulating capital to the denominator for the rate of profit, but I have not done so as the results would be little different.

Brian Green has done some powerful work in measuring circulating capital and its rate of turnover for the US economy in order to incorporate it into the measure of the rate of profit.  He considers this vital to establishing the proper rate of profit and also as an indicator of likely recessions. You can consider the usefulness of Green’s work at his website here:  https://theplanningmotive.com/ . All I would say now is that adding circulating capital to fixed assets in the denominator does not make much difference to the outcome for measuring the US rate of profit.

Anyway, on my ‘whole economy’ measure, the US rate of profit since 1946 to 2018 looks like this.

I have included measures based on historic (HC) and current costs (CC) for comparison.  What this shows is that the current cost measure hit its low in the early 1980s and the historic cost measure did not do so until the early 1990s. Why the difference? Well, Basu (as above) has explained. It’s inflation. If inflation is high, as it was between the 1960s and late 1980s, then the divergence between the changes in the HC measure and the CC measure will be greater. When inflation drops off, the difference in the changes between the two HC and CC measures will narrow.  From 1965 to 1982, the US rate of profit fell 20% on the HC measure, but 35% on the CC measure.  From 1982 to 1997, the US rate of profit rose just 9% on the HC measure, but rose 29% on the CC measure.  But over the whole post-war period up to 2018, there was a secular fall in the US rate of profit on the HC measure of 30% and on the CC measure 30%!

The data confirm Marx’s explanation of the trends in profitability.  According to Marx, the driver of changes in US profitability depends on the relative movement of two Marxian categories in the accumulation process: the organic composition of capital (C/v) and the rate of surplus value (exploitation) (s/v).  Since 1965, there has been the secular rise in the organic composition of capital (HC measure) of 60%, while the main ‘counteracting factor’ in Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the rate of surplus value, has actually fallen over 9%.  So the rate of profit fell 30%. Conversely, in the so-called ‘neo-liberal’ period from 1982 to 1997, the rate of surplus value rose 16%, more than the organic composition of capital (11%), so the rate of profit rose 9%.  Since 1997, the US rate of profit has fallen around 5%, because the organic composition of capital has risen nearly 17%, outstripping the rise in the rate of surplus value (4%).

One of the compelling results of the data is that each economic recession in the US has been preceded by a fall in the rate of profit and then by a recovery in the rate after the slump.  This is what you would expect cyclically from Marx’s law of profitability.

It appears there was significant rise in the rate of profit in the early 2000s to a peak in 2006, after which there was fall through to the Great Recession of 2008-9.  The 2006 peak was higher than the peak of 1997.  How can we explain this?  Well, in the period after the end of the mild recession of 2001 there was a massive credit-fuelled boom that led to profits in the financial sector reaching a record share of around 40% of total profits by 2006.

The profitability of the US non-financial corporate sector also rose in the period 2002-06.  It seems that the non-financial sector profitability was also boosted by the credit boom up to 2006.

But the non-financial sector is not strictly the same as the Marxian definition of the ‘productive’ sector.  A clear distinction must be made between the productive sectors of the capitalist economy ie where new value is created and the unproductive, but often necessary, sectors of the economy. The former would be manufacturing, industry, mining, agriculture, construction and transport and the latter would be commercial, financial, real estate and government.

Recently, Dimitris Paitaridis and Lefteris Tsoulfidis (PT) from the University of Macedonia separated the rate of profit for the whole economy into a ‘general rate’ for all sectors and a ‘net rate’ for just the productive sectors. This shows the following for the US general and net rate of profit from 1963 to 2015.

As in other measures, the US rate of profit is around 30% below 1960 levels but bottomed in the early 1980s with a modest recovery to the late 1990s in the so-called neoliberal period.  Interestingly, on their measure, the peak in the rate of profit was in 1997/2000, which was not surpassed in the credit boom of 2002-6 before the Great Recession.  This difference in results from AK’s and mine may be due to PT’s use of gross capital stock (before depreciation) rather than net capital stock (after depreciation) where PT find the data dubious. PT argue that the falling profit rate from 1997 onwards induced the banking sector to cut interest rates to boost lending, exposing the economy to excessive credit which eventually burst in 2007.  PT find that regression analysis showed “unidirectional causality from the rate of profit to the interest rate and unproductive activities.”

Canadian scholars Smith and Butovsky offer a similar explanation for the rise in profitability after 2001. They consider it as “anomalous and based to a considerable extent on ‘fictitious profits’ booked in the finance, insurance, and real-estate sectors, and perhaps also by many firms operating in the productive economy.”  This is a similar conclusion reached by Australian scholar Peter Jones. He found that if you strip out ‘fictitious profits’, then the US corporate sector rate of profit actually fell from 1997 – see his graph below.

More recently, in a yet unpublished thesis, Josh Watterton of Brock University, Canada argues that “although the ARP peaked in 2006, this peak was mainly due to an excessive amount of “fictitious profits” treated as real corporate booked profits.” By 2005, FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector profits doubled from 2000, totalling a near $270Bn; and reached $300Bn mark in 2016. Here is Watterton’s estimate.

Fictitious capital are financial assets like stocks, bonds and derivatives of those.  The buying and selling of these financial assets can deliver profits that are booked on the accounts of companies.  But they are not profits from investment in the production of commodities through the exploitation of labour power.  Only that can produce new value.  So if profitability and profits from productive investment fall, the profits from speculation in stocks and bonds may then also disappear and turn out to be ‘fictitious’. That is what happened from 2007 onwards.

I used the KLEMS database to calculate the profitability of the US productive sector, as defined above.  Between 1987 and 1997, the profitability of the productive sector rose 12%, then fell sharply, provoking the mini-recession of 2001.  Profitability then recovered to previous levels by 2004.  Three years of decline then led into the Great Recession. The recovery in profitability after the slump of 2008-9 was weak and in 2018 profitability remained below the peaks of 1997 and 2004 and started to fall as early as 2011.  This can explain the weak investment in productive activities in the period after 2009 that I call the Long Depression.  PT make the same point.

Using another database (the EU’s AMECO), I calculated the weighted (by GDP) average overall rate of profit in the top six capitalist economies of the world.  There was a sharp rise in profitability from 2002 to 2006; then profitability fell and the Great Recession ensued.  Profitability recovered at the end of the Great Recession but, on average, remains below the level prior to the great crash.

I have argued that the profitability of capital is key to gauging whether the capitalist economy is in a healthy state or not.  If profitability persistently falls, then eventually the mass of profits will start to fall and that is the trigger for a collapse in investment and a slump.

In 2018, on my measure, US overall profitability rose very slightly over 2017 (probably due to Trump’s corporate tax cuts).  But profitability in 2018 was still 5-7% below the 2014 peak.  If we assume real GDP, employee compensation and fixed asset growth for 2019 similar to the mini-recession of 2015-16, we can expect a further significant downturn in US profitability this year, to levels well below 2006.

Indeed, the period from 2014 to 2019 is now the longest period of contraction in US profitability since 1946.  Recessions have usually followed after just 2-3 years.  A recession is long overdue.

Despite this, the US stock market is hitting new record highs.  Corporate debt in the US is at record highs.  The price of bonds (the inverse of yields) are at record highs.  So fictitious capital is racing up again just as it did in the period 2002-06.

In contrast, the profitability of capital (a la Marx), profit margins (the gap between costs and revenues per unit of production) and the mass of corporate profits are all falling.  From 2006, the fall in profits in productive investment eventually led the economy down into recession despite record fictitious profits.  That situation beckons again.

Tax justice now!

The Triumph of Injustice: how the rich dodge taxes and how to make them pay is a new book by the inequality experts, Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez. It’s a searing indictment of American tax system, which, far from reducing the rising inequality of income and wealth in the US, actually drives it higher. The authors argue that “even as they became fabulously wealthy, the rich have seen their taxes collapse to levels last seen in the 1920s. Meanwhile working-class Americans have been asked to pay more.” Saez and Zucman show that the super-rich in America actually pay a lower tax rate than everybody else.

On their special website, Tax Justice Now, they present a wealth of data on the impact of taxation on the redistribution of income and wealth in the US. There is one staggering fact: for the first time in over century, The 400 American billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries; something that billionaire investor Warren Buffet once jokingly suggested.  His joke is confirmed as fact.

Considering all taxes paid at all levels of governments in 2018, the authors find that: “Contrary to widely held view, US tax system is not progressive. The effective rate of tax takes into account all forms of taxation on the individual (income taxes, corporate tax, capital income taxes etc). On that measure for the top 400 income holders(billionaires) the effective tax rate is 23% while it is 25-30% for working and middle classes. America’s tax system is now technically ‘regressive’ and is “a new engine for increasing inequality.”

Why do the poor pay more as a share of their income? There are very regressive sales taxes: the US has a ‘poor man’s VAT’ not only on goods and services, but also through higher payroll taxes. And the rich pay less because income from capital (property and financial assets) is hardly taxed: corporation tax is low, and there are low rates on dividends and capital gains.  Indeed, US federal corporate tax revenue almost halved in just one year (2018) with the Trump tax cuts.

Since 2010, it is mandatory to have health insurance in the US but it is mostly done through employers.  The cost is about $13,000 per covered worker, irrespective of income. So health insurance premiums are like a huge poll tax administered by employers on behalf of government, with mandatory payments to private insurers.  These insurance premiums are very regressive.

For the bottom 50% of income earners, average pre-tax income has stagnated since 1980, at $18,500 per adult. Out of this stagnating income, a rising share goes to paying taxes and health insurance.  In contrast, at the top, there are booming pre-tax incomes and falling taxes.  Thus inequality of income and wealth rises.

Saez and Zucman argue that there are three main drivers of declining progressivity: the collapse in capital taxation; allowing tax avoidance loopholes and outright evasion and; globalization with tax havens and competition to reduce taxes for foreign investment.

Everywhere, governments are competing to cut taxes for corporations: the global corporate tax rate has halved since 1980s.  The rich incorporate and retain earnings within their firms and so can save tax free. They only get taxed when they spend, unlike the rest of us.

The Panama papers revealed the extent of international tax avoidance and evasion. And Zucman’s previous book showed that $7.6 trillion in assets were being held in offshore tax havens, equivalent to 8% of all financial assets in the world.  In the past five years, the amount of wealth in tax havens has increased over 25%.  There has never been as much money held offshore as there is today. In 2014, the LuxLeaks investigation revealed that multinationals paid almost no tax in Europe, thanks to their subsidiaries in Luxembourg. In the US, Americans can set up an ‘offshore company’ in Delaware or other states like Nevada – they don’t even need to go to Panama.

Nick Shaxson, in his devastating book, Treasure Islands, tax havens and the men who stole the world, exposed the workings of all these global tax avoidance schemes for the big corporations and how governments connive in it or allow it.  Britain is already, on some measures, the biggest player in the global tax haven game. A spider’s web of satellite havens, from the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands to Jersey, captures wealth from around the world, polishes it and feeds it to the City of London. The British Overseas Territories like the British Virgin Islands or Jersey operate for these purposes and it’s the main source of revenue for these islands.

A new report from Transparency International, provides the latest evidence of the devastation Britain’s offshore spider’s web causes globally. It tots up £325bn of funds “diverted by rigged procurement, bribery, embezzlement and the unlawful acquisition of state assets”, from more than 100 countries – mostly in Africa, the former Soviet Union, Latin America and Asia. The financial criminals include a kingpin of a multibillion-pound scam to loot Malaysia, and a jailed former Moldovan prime minister. “Peppered throughout most major cases of bribery, embezzlement and rigged procurement,” says Transparency International, “you will find a UK nexus.”

Saez and Zucman propose to end these iniquities by stopping corporate tax evasion and tax competition and taxing extreme wealth, while funding health care and education through progressive income taxation.  Corporate taxation should be on country-by-country profits. For example, if Apple pays 2% on the profits it books in Ireland, US would collect the missing 23% from the overall 25% tax rate.  If Nestle pays 2% tax globally but makes 30% of its sales in the US, US would collect 30% of the 25% US tax rate. If there were an international agreement on a 25% corporate minimum tax as a pre-condition for further trade liberalization, then taxes would be at the heart of future trade deals. The infamous tax havens in countries and islands would be closed down.

But the main proposal to reverse rising inequality of wealth and income advocated by the authors is a wealth tax. Saez and Zucman estimate that with a 10% wealth tax above $1 billion, US wealth inequality can return to its 1980 level. This would also generate revenue to pay for health and education services. For example, the wealth tax proposal of Democrat candidate Elizabeth Warren starting at 2% above $50m of wealth to 10% for billionaires would raise 1% of GDP and would eventually “abolish billionaires gradually”. If there was a 90% top rate, it would “abolish billionaires now”. 

The authors also propose a tax on all national income of 6% enough to fund health care for all.  It would mean a big tax cut for the bottom 90%, allowing the abolition of all sales taxes and Trump tariffs. Consumption taxes would have no role in this ‘optimal tax’.

At a conference organised by the Peterson Institute, a mainstream think-tank, former Clinton Treasury secretary and Keynesian guru, Larry Summers attacked the wealth tax proposals. In particular, Summers argued that Saez and Zucman’s data exaggerated the regressive nature of the American system because they only looked at taxation and did not include transfers (social welfare benefits).  Summers reckons: “government policy has become more redistributional if, as is proper, you include benefit.”  On their website, Saez and Zucman dealt with issue of social transfers. They found that, even after transfers, below average households benefited little from redistribution. “Since it can be hard to know who benefits from certain forms of government spending (e.g., defense spending)”.

 

Summers then denied that wealth inequality was an important measure for redistribution. What if we had a “super effective social insurance against retirement, disability & health expenses?” Then average households would not save so much and would spend their assets. So the measure of wealth inequality would rise although people were actually better off!  But whether inequality would fall as the result of a ‘super effective social insurance’ is debatable. And anyway we don’t have such a system and wealth inequality is very high now.  Summers does not answer the basic question: why is inequality so high in the US?  At least, Saez and Zucman attempt to do so, blaming it on regressive taxation and tax havens.

Summers’ most excruciating argument against a wealth tax was that “forcing the wealthy to spend could boomerang. If the wealth tax had been in place a century ago, we would have had more anti-semitism from Henry Ford and a smaller Ford Foundation today.”  He implies that a wealth tax would force billionaires to put more money into tax-avoiding ‘foundations’ that could be used to promote nasty right-wing policies and attitudes like Henry Ford’s foundation in the 1930s.  So you see a wealth tax could generate more fascism from the rich!

Summers had to withdraw that implication.  But his conclusion stems from the assumption that billionaire foundations and charities are the best way to redistribute wealth, namely at the whim of a rich individual rather than through government social distribution.  Surely, the rich should pay taxes and everybody should get free public education and health, and get rid of private schools and hospitals funded by billionaire donations.

Summers is on stronger ground when he argued that a wealth tax won’t stop the rich controlling the political system: “there is a very real problem, but the wealth tax will not be remotely effective in addressing it. It costs $5 million a year at maximum to be a a central player in either political party. This will be easily affordable for the rich even with a wealth tax. Very few of the problems today involve personal contributions of the wealthy. They instead involve corporate contributions or large groups: e.g., the NRA, the insurance industry, sugar producers”.  Summers went on: “Saez was unable to provide even a single example of a specific instance of excessive political power that the wealth tax would address.”

And this is right. The real control of American society is through the big corporations and their lobbyists; wealthy individual billionaires play a minor role in that. It is the concentration of capital at the top through the grip of a few hundred corporations in the US and globally that is at the essence of power, control and wealth.  A wealth tax on billionaires will help state revenues and reduce inequalities to some extent. But the power of capital would not really be dented.

Of course, Summers was not making this point to propose taking over big capital, but the opposite: to reject a wealth tax on the rich. But it does expose the weakness of Saez and Zucman’s policy proposals.  They only deal with redistributing income and wealth after the event. But rising wealth and income inequality are not due to regressive taxation in the main, but to the structure of investment, production and income in the capitalist economy, namely the exploitation of labour by capital.

Indeed, rising inequality in the US and in all the major economies only kicked in from the 1980s onwards when public sector spending on health prevention and care and on education was cut back (neoliberalism); all to reverse the low levels of profitability for capital reached globally in the early 1980s.  But inequality of wealth and income existed even in ‘the golden age’ of the 1950s and 1960s.  It was lower mainly because of the strength of the labour movement, high investment in productive sectors as opposed to finance and real estate – and also higher taxation.

The reason for rising inequality from the 1980s was a rise in income going to capital in the form of profits, rent and interest and not due to the more skilled labour getting higher income than the less skilled. And this rising capital-income ratio was driven mainly by inherited wealth. ‘From rags to riches’ is not the story of capitalist wealth: it is more ‘From father to son’ or ‘From husband to widow’.

This is what Thomas Piketty showed in his book, Capital in the 21^st century.  But because he conflated capital into wealth by including non-productive assets like housing, stocks and bonds in his measure, he lost sight of how wealth is created and appropriated, as Marx shows with his law of value: namely through exploitation. As a result, Piketty (and his colleagues Saez and Zucman) have policy prescriptions for a better world that are confined to progressive taxation and a global wealth tax to ‘correct’ capitalist inequality.

And yet Piketty et al recognise that it is utopian to expect the wealthy (who control governments) to agree to a reduction in their own wealth.  They do not suggest another way to achieve a reduction in inequality: namely, to raise wage income share through labour struggles and to free trade unions from the shackles of labour legislation.

And they do not propose more radical policies to take over the banks and large companies, stop the payment of grotesque salaries and bonuses to top executives and end the risk-taking scams that have brought economies to their knees. For them, the replacement of the capitalist mode of production is not necessary, only a redistribution of the wealth and income already accrued by capital. Abolish the billionaires by taxation, not by expropriation.

The top 1% own 45% of all global personal wealth; 10% own 82%; the bottom 50% own less than 1%

The annual Credit Suisse report on global wealth has just been released. This report remains the most comprehensive and explanatory analysis of global wealth (not income) and inequality of wealth. Every year the CS global wealth report analyses the household wealth of 5.1 billion people across the globe. Household wealth is made up of the financial assets (stocks, bonds, cash, pension funds) and property (houses etc) owned.  And the report measures this net of debt. The report’s authors are James Davies, Rodrigo Lluberas and Anthony Shorrocks.  Professor Anthony Shorrocks was my university flatmate, where we both graduated in economics (although he has the much better mathematical skills!).

Global wealth grew during the past year by 2.6% to USD 360 trillion and wealth per adult reached a new record high of USD 70,850, 1.2% above the level of mid-2018 with Switzerland topping the biggest gains in wealth per adult this year. The US, China, and Europe contributed the most towards global wealth growth with USD 3.8 trillion, USD 1.9 trillion and USD 1.1 trillion respectively.

As in every year it has been published, the report reveals the extreme inequality of personal wealth globally.  The bottom half of adults in the world accounted for less than 1% of total global wealth in mid-2019, while the richest decile (the top 10% of adults) possessed 82% of global wealth and the top percentile (1%) owned nearly half (45%) of all household assets. Wealth inequality is lower within individual countries: typical values would be 35% for the share of the top 1% and 65% for the share of the top 10%. But these levels are still much higher than the corresponding figures for income inequality, or any other broad-based welfare indicator.

While advances by emerging markets continued to narrow the gaps between countries, inequality within countries grew as economies recovered after the global financial crisis. As a result, the top 1% of wealth holders increased their share of world wealth. But this trend appears to have abated since 2016 and global inequality has edged downward slightly.  Whereas the top 1% of wealth holders had 50% of the world’s personal wealth in 2016, up from 45% in 2006, that ratio has slipped back to 45%. Today, the share of the bottom 90% accounts for 18% of global wealth, compared to 11% in 2000.

The wealth pyramid captures the wealth differences between adults. Nearly 3bn adults – 57% of all adults in the world – have wealth below USD 10,000 in 2019. The next segment, covering those with wealth in the range USD 10,000–100,000, has seen the biggest rise in numbers this century, trebling in size from 514 million in 2000 to 1.7 billion in mid-2019. This reflects the growing prosperity of emerging economies, especially China. The average wealth of this group is USD 33,530, still less than half the level of average wealth worldwide, but considerably above the average wealth of the countries in which most of the members reside. This leaves the final group of countries with wealth below USD 5,000, which are heavily concentrated in central Africa and central and south Asia.

So here’s the staggering thing. If you live in one of the advanced capitalist countries and you own your house and have some savings, then you will be among the top 10% of all wealth holders in the world.  That’s because the vast majority of households in the world have little or no wealth at all.

A person needs net assets of just USD 7,087 to be among the wealthiest half of world citizens in mid-2019! However, USD 109,430 is required to be a member of the top 10% of global wealth holders and USD 936,430 to belong to the top 1%.  African and Indian citizens are concentrated in the base segment of the wealth pyramid, China in the middle tiers, and North America and Europe in the top percentile. But also evident is a significant number of North American and European residents in the bottom global wealth decile, as younger adults acquire debt in advanced economies, resulting in negative net wealth.

And inequality gets wider at the top of the pyramid.  There are 46.8 million millionaires in the world in mid-2019, but most have wealth between USD 1 million and USD 5 million: 41.1 million or 88% of the millionaires. Another 3.7 million adults (7.9%) are worth between USD 5 million and 10 million, and almost exactly two million adults now have wealth above USD 10 million. Of these, 1.8 million have assets in the USD 10–50 million range, leaving 168,030 Ultra High Net Worth (UHNW) individuals with net worth above USD 50 million in mid-2019.  In effect, these are the ruling elite of the world.

The United States has by far the greatest number of millionaires: 18.6 million, or 40% of the world total. For many years, Japan held second place in the millionaire rankings by a comfortable margin. However, Japan is now in third place with 6%, overtaken by China (10%). Next come the United Kingdom and Germany with 5% each, followed by France (4%), then Italy, Canada and Australia (3%).

Switzerland (USD 530,240), Australia (USD 411,060) and the United States (USD 403,970) again head the league table according to wealth per adult. The ranking by median average wealth per adult favours countries with lower levels of wealth inequality. This year, Australia (USD 191,450) edged ahead of Switzerland (USD 183,340) into first place.  So Australia has the highest median wealth per adult in the world (that’s mainly house values).

Financial assets suffered most during the financial crisis of 2008-9 and then recovered in the early post-crisis years. This year, their value rose in every region, contributing 39% of the increase in gross wealth worldwide, and 71% of the rise in North America. However, non-financial assets (property) provided the main stimulus to overall growth in recent years. Over the 12 months to mid-2019, they grew faster than financial assets in every region. Non-financial wealth accounted for the bulk of new wealth in China, Europe and Latin America, and almost all new wealth in Africa and India. But household debt rose even faster, at 4.0% overall. Household debt increased in all regions, and at a double-digit rate in China and India. The debt squeeze is coming.

Corporate debt, fiscal stimulus and the next recession

The debt owed by corporations in the major economies has risen since the end of the Great Recession in 2009.  With global growth slowing and the prospect rising of an outright global recession recurring ten years after the last one, the debt held by corporations may soon become so burdensome to a sufficiently large number of companies that it triggers a round of corporate bankruptcies.  The banks will then see a sharp rise in non-performing loans. That could lead to a new credit crunch as banks refuse to lend to each other.

Such a credit squeeze briefly erupted last month, when the US Federal Reserve was forced to inject over $50bn into the banking system in order to reverse a very sharp rise in inter-bank interest rates as cash-flush banks refused to help out weaker ones.  The cause of that squeeze was a rise in the supply of government bonds as the Trump administration issued more to cover its rising budget deficit.  Some banks were not able to fund the purchases they were committed to without borrowing. So, as bank reserves held with central banks in US, Europe and Japan have surged, interbank money market volume has declined.

As a result of this shock to the credit markets, the Fed has returned to the market to buy short-term Treasury bills to restore bank liquidity.  So, having ended quantitative easing (buying bonds) and started to hike its policy interest rate last year, the Fed has had to backtrack, cut rates and re-introduce QE again. More than half of central banks are now in easing mode, the biggest proportion since the aftermath of the financial crisis. During the third quarter of 2019, 58% of central banks cut interest rates.

In its latest Global Financial Stability report, the IMF expressed its worry that: “corporations in eight major economies are taking on more debt, and their ability to service it is weakening. We look at the potential impact of a material economic slowdown—one that is as half as severe as the global financial crisis of 2007-08 and our conclusion is sobering: debt owed by firms unable to cover interest expenses with earnings, which we call corporate debt-at-risk, could rise to $19 trillion. That is almost 40 percent of total corporate debt in the economies we studied, which include the United States, China, and some European economies.”

And in emerging markets: “external debt is rising among emerging and frontier economies as they attract capital flows from advanced economies, where interest rates are lower. Median external debt has risen to 160 percent of exports from 100 percent in 2008 among emerging market economies. A sharp tightening in financial conditions and higher borrowing costs would make it harder for them to service their debts.” Tobias Adrian and Fabio Natalucci, two senior IMF officials responsible for the Global Financial Stability Report, said: “A sharp, sudden tightening in financial conditions could unmask these vulnerabilities and put pressures on asset price valuations.”

I have suggested for some time (years) that corporate debt could be the financial trigger for a new recession.  It was housing debt (sub-prime mortgages) in 2007-8; now it could be corporate debt (through ‘leveraged loans’ ie loans companies already loaded with debt).

Now it seems that the IMF is catching on to that possibility.  Ex-Goldman Sachs chief economist and now columnist for the FT, Gavyn Davies, has also latched on to this growing risk.  Davies commented: “I argued in March that this problem was not yet dangerous, but that was probably too complacent.”  He was complacent, he says, because “Although US corporate debt-to-income ratios were already close to all-time peaks, other aspects of company balance sheets and financial flows were in much better shape. Profit margins were still fairly robust, the net financial balance of the corporate sector was in comfortable surplus, interest-to-income ratios were low and debt-to-equity ratios were healthy.”  But now: “In the last six months, the condition of US corporate finances has become more worrying. As in other major economies, profit margins have come under increasing downward pressure, because producers’ wage costs have been rising more rapidly than selling prices to the consumer.”

As a result of shrinking profit margins and slowing revenue growth, earnings for S&P 500 companies are now estimated to have fallen in the past 12 months, down from 20 per cent growth in 2018. Furthermore, earnings growth for the large quoted companies contained in the S&P 500, including foreign profits, has been much higher than the figure for the entire company sector in the domestic economy.  Those figures show that US profits have risen by only 6 per cent in the last three years, compared with an increase of 50 per cent for the S&P 500.  And non-financial sector profits are actually lower than in 2014!  It’s a profits recession.

In a previous post ahead of Davies, I looked at the earnings results of the top 500 companies by stock market value in the US, S&P-500.  With nearly all results in for the second quarter of 2019 ending in June, total earnings (profits) are up only 0.5% and sales revenues up only 4.7%.  After taking into account current inflation, real earnings were negative and revenues barely positive.  And that’s for the top 500 companies.  For the smaller companies, the situation is even worse.  Earnings are down over 10% from last year and revenues up only 2.2%, or flat after inflation.  Excluding the finance sector, earnings would be down 21%.  A sector analysis shows that the retail sector did best as the American consumer went on spending, along with the finance sector.  But productive sectors like technology saw a 6.3% fall in profits.  And that is key. For the first half of 2019, the earnings are in negative territory compared to a 23% rise in the first half of 2018.  And the forecast for Q3 earnings is for a further fall of 4.3% yoy.

Davies reckons that: “The deterioration in profits growth has been accompanied by more aggressive corporate financial behaviour, while real capital investment to expand productive capacity has been cut back. According to the IMF stability report, share buybacks, dividends and merger and acquisition activities — financed by leveraged loans and high-yield bonds — have surged in 2019. These activities have spread to small and medium-sized firms, which the IMF says are particularly vulnerable on the profit front.”  Exactly.  As profitability (and now even the mass of profits) falls, companies have tried to counteract this with financial speculation. That might be okay for large firms with considerable cash reserves but not for smaller companies that are not cash-rich.

So Davies now concludes exactly what I argued some time ago. “Taken in isolation from other economic shocks, such corporate financial weaknesses are unlikely to trigger a recession, but they could certainly exacerbate the effects of other contractionary shocks. This is what happened in 2008, when a medium-sized shock in the subprime mortgage market caused an enormous downturn in economic activity. The impact of the trade disputes on business confidence, which has been collapsing in recent months, is the most obvious current threat.”

At the same time as Davies reached this conclusion, the chief US economist for the Societe Generale bank, Stephen Gallagher, argued that US recessions are typically preceded by an erosion in corporate profit margins, or profit per dollar of revenue. Costs generally rise near the end of the cycle while sales flatten out.  There is a profit cycle – something that readers of this blog will know well.  The current profit margin cycle (the blue line in the graph below) is reaching the point of a recession.  The graph shows the historic trend in profit margins at various stages of the business cycle, as well as the margins in this cycle.

Gallagher points out that US profit margins have been squeezed since 2016. “The erosion in margins is the key to business-cycle dynamics,” says Gallagher. “If the U.S. does enter a recession in 2020, history is very likely to view it as a trade-war recession. But trade tensions are only the catalyst, not the main cause.” he says.  “With a backdrop of weak profit expectations, the trade uncertainty poses serious challenges for business planning,” Gallagher argues. “In an environment of much stronger profit margins, the same trade uncertainty would likely pose less of a deterrent.”  

As economic historian and author of Crashed, Adam Tooze tweeted, “What if we orientate our analysis of business cycle around what is presumably the basic driver of business activity i.e. corporate profits, rather than intermediate factors that may or may not seriously impact those profits e.g. tariffs?”  Exactly. A financial crash or a trade war does not lead to an economic recession unless there are already serious problems with profitability.

It is not just Gavyn Davies and the IMF that are waking up to the financial and debt risk. In a speech on 25 September, Fed governor Lael Brainard said that “financial risk-taking by US companies in the form of payouts and M&A has increased — in contrast with subdued capital expenditures. Surges in financial risk-taking usually precede economic downturns. As business losses accumulate, and delinquencies and defaults rise, banks are less willing or able to lend. This dynamic feeds on itself.”  So the Fed must act with new monetary easing: “The Fed will decide whether to activate its countercyclical capital buffer in November. This mechanism enables the Fed to require the nation’s largest banks to increase capital buffers against the time when economic stresses emerge.”

Over in Japan, it is the same story.  The Bank of Japan’s chief Kuroda called for a mix of steps to boost economic growth. He returned to what used to be called the three arrows of Abenomics: monetary easing, flexible fiscal spending and structural reforms to raise the country’s long-term growth potential. Kuroda is still convinced that central banks can save the day, even if governments should also help with fiscal stimulus measures. “We are equipped with unconventional tool kits, so there is no need to be too pessimistic about the effectiveness of monetary policy.”  Kuroda hinted at further easing as early as this month.

But as I have discussed in detail before, monetary policy easing has failed to restore pre-2007 growth rates and is now unable to stop the oncoming recession.  Indeed, interest rates globally are at record lows and even negative in many major economies, and yet the world economy is still slowing to a stop.

At the recent IMF-World Bank meeting, former governor of the Bank of England during the Great Recession, Mervyn King reckoned that the “world economy is sleepwalking into a new financial crisis because mainstream economics and official institutions have still not changed their complacent and faulty ideas before the last crash.  By sticking to the new orthodoxy of monetary policy and pretending that we have made the banking system safe, we are sleepwalking towards that crisis.” King went on: “resistance to new thinking meant a repeat of the chaos of the 2008-09 period was looming.”  This was rich of King, who before 2007 has remarked at how well the world economy was doing – ‘a nice decade’ he called it. He too was stuck in the ‘old thinking’ then.

Echoing my own view of what I call The Long Depression, King said the world economy was stuck in a ‘low growth trap’ and that the recovery from the slump of 2008-09 was weaker than that after the Great Depression. “Following the Great Inflation, the Great Stability and the Great Recession, we have entered the Great Stagnation.” King supported the view regularly expressed by Keynesian former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers of the concept of secular stagnation, a permanent period of low growth in which ultra-low interest rates are ineffective.

If monetary policy is now useless despite the vain hopes of Powell at the Fed or Kuroda at the BoJ, what is to be done?  King claims the problem was “a distorted pattern of demand and output” ie excessive investment in China and Germany and insufficient investment elsewhere.  There has to be a global shift in savings and investment.  But apart from the obvious question of how such a shift could possibly be achieved without international cooperation, it is not a ‘global imbalance’ that is the problem.  There has been such an imbalance for decades.  The US, UK etc have regularly run current account deficits while Germany, Japan and China have run surpluses.  And yet economic growth has still taken place. The cause of regular and recurring crises can be found in the arguments of Gavyn Davies, not Mervyn King.

Everywhere, whether among mainstream economists or official institutions, the cry now is for ‘fiscal stimulus’. For example, Laurence Boone and Marco Buti, OECD economists call for Right here, right now: The quest for a more balanced policy mix. “while monetary policy is widely recognised as facing increasing constraints, fiscal policy and structural reforms need to play a stronger role. In particular, fiscal policy could become more supportive, notably in the euro area. Undertaking the right type of public investment now – in infrastructure, education or to mitigate climate change – would both stimulate our economies and contribute to making them stronger and more sustainable.”

Just as Keynes claimed it would be necessary in the 1930s Great Depression, now, as the Long Depression enters its tenth year, the answer is for higher government spending, tax cuts and budget deficits (and don’t worry about rising government debt any longer). But just as fiscal stimulus did not work in the 1930s (instead it took a world war and governments taking control of savings and investment), so it will not work this time either.  And that is assuming that politicians will even try it.

Fiscal stimulus and government ‘management of the economy’ is the touchstone of Keynesian and post-Keynesian thinking, including so-called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).   The only real difference between Keynesian and MMT stimulus is the latter think it can be done without issuing bonds to fund it: ‘printing money’ is just fine.

The real shock is that even some Marxists consider that fiscal stimulus and more government spending is all we need to avoid a new slump.  The question of falling profitability and profits highlighted by Gavyn Davies is apparently not relevant at all.  The profitability of capital apparently plays no key role in this profit-making capitalist system.  You see profits come from investment, not vice versa.  So all we have to do is boost investment.

Take a recent article by John Weeks, a longstanding leftist (Marxist?) economist who once wrote a brilliant paper back in the 1980s (John Weeks on underconsumption) that showed Marxist crisis theory had nothing to do with a lack of effective demand caused by the underconsumption of workers. Weeks is now the coordinator of the Progressive Economy Forum, a leftist think-tank.  He now writes: “Market economies require policy management: (as) Keynes taught us.”  You see back in the Golden Age of the 1960s when economic policy-makers followed Keynes and intervened with fiscal measures to manage the economy, there was high economic growth and no crises.  It was only when Keynesian management was dropped by neo-liberal governments that crises ensued.

Weeks now argues that “capitalist economies do suffer periodically from extreme instability, the most recent example being the Great Financial Crisis of the late 2000s. These moments of extreme instability, recessions and depressions, result … from private demand “failures”; specifically, the volatility of private investment and to a lesser extent of export demand.”  Weeks correctly points out that it is the volatility in investment that causes booms and slumps, not private consumption.  But what causes the swings in investment?  Weeks offers a straight Keynesian answer: “The instability results because investments are made in anticipation of future economic conditions, which are uncertain.”  So it is uncertainty about the future – a subjective cause and nothing to do with the objective picture of the current profitability of investment.

If Weeks (and the Keynesians) are right, then indeed, “public expenditure (can) serves to compensate for the inherent instability of private demand. This is the essence of “counter-cyclical” fiscal policy, that the central government increases its spending when private demand declines, and raises taxes when private expenditures create excessive inflationary pressures. During 1950-1970 that was the policy consensus, and it coincided with the “golden age of capitalism“.

But it is not right.  First, the golden age did not come to an end because Keynesian policies were dropped; on the contrary, Keynesian policies were dropped because the Golden Age came to an end.  And that was because the profitability of capital took a serious dive from the late 1960s to the early 1980s in all the major capitalist economies. As a result, investment was volatile and economies suffered several slumps.  Far from Keynesian demand management stopping these swings, even in the 1950s and 1960s, they actually exacerbated them.  At least that was the view of the leading British Keynesian economist of the 1960s, Christopher Dow, who summed up his monumental history of the period: “The major fluctuations in the rate of growth of demand and output in the years after 1952 were thus chiefly due to government policy. This was not the intended effect; in each phase, it must be supposed, policy went further than intended, as in turn did the correction of those effects. As far as internal conditions are concerned then, budgetary and monetary policy failed to be stabilising, and must on the contrary be regarded as having been positively destabilising.” (JCR Dow, The Management of the British Economy, 1964)

Second, investment does not lead profits, but vice versa in a capitalist economy.  It is not the lack of private demand that causes a crisis; but a crisis is just that: a lack of effective demand.  But this ‘realisation’ crisis, to use Marx’s term, is the result of the profitability crisis.  That is where any proper analysis should start on the causes of crises – as now Davies and Tooze suggest.  I and others have presented both theoretical (Marxist) and empirical support for this causal connection. Keynesians may deny it, but it seems that even mainstream economists like Gavyn Davies have now woken up to this causal connection.  If this is right, then attempts to avoid a new slump using fiscal policies will not curb or reverse the fall in corporate profits and investment – and thus will not avoid a new slump.

There is already a global manufacturing recession.  The German economy as a whole is in virtual recession, according to its own central bank, the Bundesbank. China is now growing at its slowest pace in nearly 30 years.  The trigger points for a global slump are multiplying.  We have riots and protests against austerity cuts in several ‘emerging economies’ as the global slowdown hits exports and revenues: in Lebanon, in Ecuador, in Chile, in impoverished Haiti.  At the same time, the larger emerging economies are either in a slump (Argentina, Turkey) or in stagnation (Brazil, Mexico, South Africa).

Even in the US, the best performing major advanced capitalist economy, growth is slowing, while investment and profits are falling.  And within that, one of America’s major companies is in deep trouble.  The grounding of the 737 Max jet after two tragic crashes has quietly lowered US growth, reduced productivity and trimmed earnings at a number of American companies. Boeing is no ordinary company. It is the largest manufacturing exporter in the US and a very large private employer. Its products cost hundreds of millions of dollars and require thousands of suppliers. It is no surprise that benching Boeing’s fastest-selling aircraft is having ripple effects throughout the economy.  Economists put the drag on growth from Boeing at around 0.25 percentage points in the second quarter while the White House Council of Economic Advisers reckoned the damage was even greater: Boeing’s troubles cut GDP from March through June by 0.4 percentage points.

Monetary and fiscal policy will be helpless in stopping any oncoming economic tsunami.

Capital not ideology

Back in 2014, French economist Thomas Piketty published a blockbuster book, Capital in the 21st century.  Repeating the name of Marx’s Capital, the implication of the title was that it was an updating Marx’s 19th century critique of capitalism for the 21st century.  Piketty argued that the inequality of income and wealth in the major capitalist economies had reached extremes not seen since the late 18th century and unless something was done, inequality would continue to rise.

The book had a huge impact, not just among economists (particularly in America, less so in France) but also among the general public.  Two million copies were sold of this monumental 800p publication which was full of theoretical arguments, empirical data and anecdotes to explain increased inequality of wealth in modern capitalist economies.  The book eventually won the dubious honour for the most bought book that nobody read, taking over from Stephen Hawking’s The Brief History of Time.  I suppose Marx’s Capital is also part of this club.

Many critiques of Piketty’s arguments followed, both from the mainstream and the heterodox.  Piketty has made a great contribution in the empirical work that he, fellow Frenchman Daniel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez have made in estimating the levels of inequality in capitalist economies.  And before that, there was the father of inequality studies, the recently deceased Anthony Atkinson, (whose work was the foundation of my own PhD thesis on inequality of wealth in 19th century Britain).

But, as I argued in my own critique of Piketty, which was published in Historical Materialism at the time, Piketty was not following Marx at all – indeed, he trashed Marx’s economic theory based on the law of value and profitability. For Piketty, the exploitation of labour by capital was not the issue but the ownership of wealth (ie property and financial assets), which enabled the rich to increase their share of total income in an economy.  So it was not the replacement of the capitalist mode of production that was needed but the redistribution of the wealth accumulated by the rich.

Piketty’s fame among the mainstream soon faded.  At the 2015 annual conference of the American Economic Association, Piketty was feted, if criticised.  Within a year, all was forgotten. Now, six years later, Piketty has followed up with a new book, Capital and Ideology, which is even larger: some 1200pp; as one reviewer said, longer than War and Peace. Whereas the first book provided theory and evidence on inequality, this book seeks to explain why this had been allowed to happen in the second half of the 20th century.  And from that, he proposes some policies to reverse it.  Piketty broadens the scope of his analysis to the entire world and presents a historical panorama of how ownership of assets (including people) was treated, and justified, in various historical societies, from China, Japan, and India, to the European-ruled American colonies, and feudal and capitalist societies in Europe.

His premise is that inequality is a choice. It’s something ‘societies’ opt for, not an inevitable result of technology and globalisation. Whereas Marx saw ideologies as a product of class interests, Piketty takes the idealist view that history is a battle of ideologies. The major economies have increased inequalities because the ruling elites have provided bogus justifications for inequality. Every unequal society, he says, creates an ideology to justify inequality. All these justifications add up to what he calls the “sacralisation of property”.

The job of economists is to expose these bogus arguments.  Take billionaires. “How can we justify that their existence is necessary for the common good? Contrary to what is often said, their enrichment was obtained thanks to collective goods, which are the public knowledge, the infrastructures, the laboratories of research.” (Shades of Mariana Mazzucato’s work here).  The notion that billionaires create jobs and boost growth is false.  Per capita income growth was 2.2% a year in the U.S. between 1950 and 1990. But when the number of billionaires exploded in the 1990s and 2000s — growing from about 100 in 1990 to around 600 today — per capita income growth fell to 1.1%.

Piketty says that the type of free-market capitalism that has dominated the US since Ronald Reagan needs to be reformed. “Reaganism begun to justify any concentration of wealth, as if the billionaires were our saviours.” But; “Reaganism has shown its limits: Growth has been halved, inequalities have doubled. It is time to break out of this phase of sacredness of property.”

He does not want what most people consider ‘socialism’, but he wants to “overcome capitalism.”  Far from abolishing property or capital, he wants to spread its rewards to the bottom half of the population, who even in rich countries have never owned much. To do this, he says, requires redefining private property as “temporary” and limited: you can enjoy it during your lifetime, in moderate quantities.

How is this to be done? Well, Piketty calls for a graduated wealth tax of 5% on those worth 2 million euros or more and up to 90% on those worth more than 2 billion euros. “Entrepreneurs will have millions or tens of millions,” he said. “But beyond that, those who have hundreds of millions or billions will have to share with shareholders, who could be employees. So no, there won’t be billionaires anymore.” From the proceeds, a country such as France could give each citizen a trust fund worth about €120,000 at age 25. Very high tax rates, he notes, didn’t impede fast growth in the 1950-80 period.

Piketty also calls for “educational justice” — essentially, spending the same amount on each person’s education. And he favours giving workers a major say over how their companies are run, as in Germany and Sweden.  Employees should have 50% of the seats on company boards; that the voting power of even the largest shareholders should be capped at 10%; much higher taxes on property, rising to 90% for the largest estates; a lump sum capital allocation of €120,000 (just over £107,000) to everyone when they reach 25; and an individualised carbon tax calculated by a personalised card that would track each person’s contribution to global heating.  He calls this moving beyond capitalism to “participatory socialism and social-federalism”.

This all smacks of returning capitalist economies to the days of the so-called ‘golden age’ from 1948-65, when inequality was much lower, economic growth was much stronger and working class households experienced full employment and were able to get educated to levels that enabled them to do more skilled and better paid jobs.  There was a ‘mixed economy’, where capitalist companies supposedly worked in partnership with trade unions and the government. This was a myth.  But if you accept Piketty’s premise that this social democratic paradise existed and its demise was brought about by a change of ideology, it is possible to consider that “redistributive ideas’ could gain support after the experience of the Great Recession and the rise of extreme inequality now.

Piketty argues that the social democratic parties dropped their original aims of equality and opted instead for meritocracy ie hard work and education will deliver better lives for the working class.  And they did so because they had gradually transformed themselves from being parties of the less-educated and poorer classes to become parties of the educated and affluent middle and upper-middle classes. To a large extent, he reckons, traditionally left parties changed because their original social-democratic agenda was so successful in opening up education and high-income possibilities to the people, who in the 1950s and 1960s came from modest backgrounds. These people, the “winners” of social democracy, continued voting for left-wing parties but their interests and worldview were no longer the same as that of their (less-educated) parents. The parties’ internal social structure thus changed— it was the product of their own political and social success.

Really?  The failure of social democratic parties to represent the interests of working people goes way back before the 1970s.  Social democratic parties supported the nationalist aims of the warring capitalist powers in WW1; in Britain, the leaders of the Labour Party went into coalition with the Conservatives to impose austerity and break the trade unions in 1929.  After WW2, social democracy moved from Attlee to Wilson to Callaghan to Kinnock and finally to Blair and Brown.  It was a similar story in continental Europe: in France from Mitterand to Hollande; in Germany from Brandt to Schmidt.

This was not just because the composition of the SD parties changed from industrial workers to educated professionals.  The very health of post-war capitalist economies changed.  The brief ‘golden age’ came to an end, not because of a change of ideology (or as Joseph Stiglitz has put it, ‘a change of rules’) but because the profitability of capital plummeted in the 1970s (following Marx’s law of profitability as outlined in Capital).  That meant that pro-capitalist politicians could no longer make concessions to labour; indeed, the gains of the golden age had to be reversed in the ‘neoliberal’ period.  So ideology changed with the change in the economic health of capital.  And social democratic leaders went along with this change because, in the last analysis, they do not think it is possible to replace capitalism with socialism. “There is no alternative” – to use Thatcher’s phrase.

At least, Piketty reckons it is possible to go beyond capitalism, unlike Branco Milanovic who, in his latest book, Capitalism Alone that I reviewed recently, agrees with Thatcher and reckons capitalism is here to stay. “You have to go beyond capitalism,” says Piketty.  In an interview, when asked “Why this word ‘beyond”, why not “To get out of capitalism”?  Piketty replied: “I say “go beyond” to say go out, abolish, replace. But the term “exceed” me allows for a little more emphasis on the need to discuss the alternative system. After the Soviet failure, we can no longer promise the abolition of capitalism without debating long and precisely what we will put in place next. I’m trying to contribute.”

Piketty reckons the “propriétariste and meritocratic narrative” of the neo-liberal period is getting fragile. “There’s a growing understanding that so-called meritocracy has been captured by the rich, who get their kids into the top universities, buy political parties and hide their money from taxation.”  That leaves a gap in the political market for redistributionist ideas.

But Piketty’s answers are just that: a redistribution of unequal wealth and income generated by the private ownership of capital, not replacing the ownership and control of the means of production and the exploitation of labour in production with a system of common ownership and control.  Apparently, the big multi-nationals will continue, big pharma will continue; the fossil-fuel companies will continue; the military-industrial complex will continue.  Regular and recurring crises in capitalist production and accumulation will continue.  But, as these vested interests of capital are still not generating enough profitability to allow any significant increase in the taxation of extreme wealth and income that they control, what chances are there that the current ‘ideology’ of the ‘sacralisation of property’ can be overcome, without taking them over?