The ideology of neoliberalism: trickle down theory of growth and distribution. The reality a tad different: the gushing up of income and wealth. But, in a manner of speaking, we always knew that this is what neoliberalism was all about; we knew, in other words, that the neoliberal turn of the late 1970s was meant to facilitate the flow of income, wealth and power up the societal pyramid, that it was meant to restore the economic and political clout that “finance capital” had lost during the post World War II period. We knew that it was meant to efficiently pump the economic surplus out of the working people and channel it up the income ladder to the top fraction of the capitalist class. That neoliberalism performed this role even more effectively than expected by its hardest-core champions emerges clearly from recent studies of income and wealth trends of the past few decades.
TOP US INCOMES OVER THE CENTURY
Noted Marxist economists Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy have studied the changing patterns of income and wealth under neoliberalism in great detail . [1] Drawing on the extensive research on income and wealth inequality around the world by Emmanuel Saez [2] and Thomas Piketty [3], Dumenil and Levy clearly show: (a) that the neoliberal regime was preceded by falling income shares of the top income groups in the US for an extended period of time, (b) that the so-called neoliberal turn has clearly reversed the trend towards progressive redistribution of income of the post-War years, (c) that the income shares of the top income groups have climbed back up to pre-War levels, and even surpassed them, and (d) that ownership of the productive resources of society remains as skewed as before making claims of the development of middle-class capitalism in the U.S. totally baseless.
Below, we reproduce some of the striking trends that Dumenil and Levy’s presented in their article in the New Left Review (Volume 30, November-December, 2004) and also extend the analysis to the year 2007 (by using an extended data set that Saez and Piketty has made publicly available). [4] The picture that emerges from such an analysis clearly show that the trends identified by Dumenil and Levy (2004) have continued operating unhindered right until the end of 2007, i.e., right till the onset of the Great Contraction of 2008. Did the current crisis have anything to do with this worsening distribution of income in society? Will the Great Contraction turn into the Great Depression of the 21st century? Will the current crisis unleash progressive social forces that will reverse the horrific neoliberal income trends? Will the working class regain its social and political strength? These are important and interesting questions, but I do not wish to address them in this article.
Let us instead study the evolution of income distribution in some detail. Chart 1 presents data relating to the shares of total income going to various “top” income earning groups in the U.S. for the period 1917-2007. Even a cursory glance reveals the most striking feature shared by all the graphs, their U-like shapes. The U-shape implies the following: the share of total income garnered by the “top” group was historically high in the 1930s (the pinnacle of the original liberal era of capitalism); the share steadily declined after the second World War, through the “Golden Age of Capitalism” (because of the struggle of the working class); the trend reversed course around the late 1970s (with the onset of the neoliberal counter-revolution), and steadily gained lost ground in the next three decades. This general feature is true of all the graphs and is the remarkable feature about income distribution that emerges from all serious studies.
The first graph on the left-top of Chart 1 displays the share of income going to the top 10 per cent of income earners in the U.S. Towards the end of the 1920s, the share of the top 10 percent had nudged 50 per cent (from below); it recovered that level by 2006. The top 10 per cent of the population takes half of all the income created during any year; isn’t that remarkable? Well, that is (neo) liberal capitalism.
The second graph of Chart 1, the one on the right-top, displays the share of income going to the group of income earners running from the top 5 to the top 1 per cent of the population. Much like the top 10 percent, their income fell through the Golden Age and then started the ascent in the neoliberal era, without as yet reaching the historically high levels in the late 1920s.
CHART 1
The third graph at the bottom-left of Chart 1 displays the share of income going to the top 1 percent of the U.S. population. Quite astonishingly, they get more than a fifth of all the income generated in society now: just a nice throwback to the glorious late-1920s, they would point out. Thus, in 1928, the top 1 per cent of the income earners in the U.S. got about 24 per cent of the total income; in 2006, the top 1 per cent of the population was once again receiving about the same share: 24 per cent of the total income generated in the economy.
What about the scenario at the very top, the top of the top so to say? The fourth graph in Chart 1, the one at the bottom-right, provides some clues. As can be seen, the share of income garnered by the top 0.01 per cent of the income earners was about 5 per cent of the total income during the 1920s; that figure had already been reached by the end of the 1990s. The dip in the share at the end of the 2000 is a reflection of the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the ensuing short recession in the early parts of 2001. They got their act together pretty quickly, and the share of total income going to this group rapidly climbed up in the “boom” of the 2000s, surpassing the figure for the heyday of liberal capitalism. In 1928, the top 0.01 per cent of the income earners in the U.S. garnered about 5 per cent of the total income; by 2006 their share of total income was back at that level: 6.04 per cent. Neoliberalism triumphs liberalism!
What do we take away from these striking graphs? I would suggest the following three. First, we can safely make the claim that income and wealth are awfully concentrated in capitalism; a capitalism that caters to the middle class is a myth. To understand the import of this simple proposition recall that the mainstream media never tires of portraying the U.S. economy as a haven for the middle class, where anyone, even Joe the Plumber, can easily climb up the economic ladder with grit, determination and hard work; or, so the story goes. Aggregate trends in the distribution of income over the last three decades that have been presented in Chart 1 clearly makes nonsense of this oft-repeated fairy tale.
Second, the concentration of wealth and income under capitalism is nothing new; it is rather the normal state of affairs in capitalism, as the data for the last 90 years show. When one takes a long and historical view, the so-called Golden Age of capitalism, based on the compromise between capital and labour, and buttressed by re-distributive policies of a welfare state, seems to be the exception rather than the rule. The workings of welfare state capitalism quickly led to the creation of a situation, endogenous it must be remembered, that militated against the core principles and institutional features of welfare state capitalism.
And third, that the concentration of income, wealth and power keeps increasing as we move up the income pyramid, so that the buck really stops at the top. What about the very top of the top of the top? Well, let us see.
TOP OF THE TOP
Tucked away in an obscure corner of the business section of the New York Times on February 18, 2010 is a small article with some very striking facts relating to the important issues of income, class and power in the U.S. that we have been discussing. [5] The article discusses interesting facts relating to income and taxation of the top 400 income earning families in the U.S., the families sitting on the very top of the income and wealth pyramid in the U.S. Data about the earnings of the top 400 families, based on tax return information, was first made public by the Clinton Administration. Much along expected lines, the Bush Administration cut off access to this report, the so-called “top 400 report”; the Obama Administration has again made it public. [6]
Writing on Tax.com, a Web site run by Tax Analysts, David Cay Johnston provides a wealth of information about the top 400 families that might be worth looking at carefully; the NY Times report drew on Johnston’s article, and we will also use data that he has made available on-line along with his article. [7]
Here are some facts to get started with. Average annual income of the top 400 income-earning families was $131.1 million in 2001; it had more than doubled within the next 6 years, reaching $345 million in 2007. That was a whopping 17.5 per cent annual compound rate of growth over that 6 year period. In 2007, the total income of the top 400 families was $138 billion, rising from $105.3 billion a year ago. Adjusted for inflation, the top 400 families witnessed a 27 per cent increase in their income between 2006 and 2007; the bottom 90 per cent of U.S. families saw their income rise by a mere 3 per cent during the same period. If we go back a little further we see the divergence taking shape more clearly. Between 1992 and 2007, the real income of the bottom 90 per cent of the U.S. families increased by 13 per cent; during the same period, the real incomes of the top 400 increased by 399 per cent.
To put these numbers into some perspective, let us compare the incomes of the top 400 U.S. families with some figures for the whole U.S. economy. Median real income, i.e., income adjusted for inflation, for U.S. families in 2007 was $52,163. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 37.3 million persons were below the poverty line in 2007 (i.e., about 12.7 per cent of the population was deemed “poor”), where the poverty line was defined (in 2008) as follows: it was $22,025 for a family of four; for a family of three, it was $17,163; for a family of two, $14,051; and for unrelated individuals, $10,991. While the incomes of the top 400 families increased to astronomical amounts, there were 45.7 million people without health insurance coverage in the U.S. in 2007. [8]
To make the comparison a little more systematic and to get an idea of the true nature of the income generation process under neoliberalism, we have summarized some data in Chart 2. [9] The graph on the top-left in Chart 2 plots the inflation adjusted average income of the top 400 U.S. income-earning families from 1992 to 2007. Average real income increased from $71.6 million in 1992 to $356.7 million in 2007, a 399 per cent increase over the 15 year period, which translates into a real income increase of $285.2 million.
The graph on the top-right of Chart 2 plots the ratio of the average income of the top 400 families and the average income of the bottom 90 percent of U.S. families (arranged in terms of household income). In 1992, the ratio was 2419; in 2007, it had become 10634. Think about these numbers again. In 1992, the average income of the top 400 U.S. families was 2419 times the average income of the bottom 90 per cent; in the next 15 years, that ratio had seen a more than 4 fold increase. That is neoliberalism in a nutshell.
The next graph, the one on the bottom-left of Chart 2 plots the share of total income (what the IRS calls the adjusted gross income) that went to the top 400 families. In 1992, the figure was 0.52 per cent; by 2007, it had increased to 1.59 per cent. Now think about that again. During the period under consideration, the U.S. economy had about 105 million households; thus in 2007, the top 400 out of these 105 million households were getting 1.59 dollars for every 100 dollars generated in the economy. (If you divide 400 by 105 million, you get a 0.0000038!)
The last graph, the one on the bottom-right of Chart 2, shows the policy response of the U.S. governments to this rising inequality. What should the state do when faced with this enormous concentration of wealth at the very top of the income pyramid? Why, aid that process. Effective tax rates for the top 400 families saw a remarkable secular decline over this 15 year period, starting at 26 per cent in 1992 and falling to about 17 per cent by 2007. So, as the incomes started flowing up, tax rates started going down. Result: disposable real income, i.e., after-tax real income, of the top 400 U.S. families shot through the roof.
CHART 2
EVOLUTION OF WAGE INCOME
How did this huge income inequality get built up? The simple answer: neoliberal counter-revolution. The whole institutional set-up and policy framework that characterized the so-called Golden Age of capitalism was the result of the class struggle of labour against capital; the power of the working class had managed to institute policies that resulted in the re-distribution of income away from capital and towards labour. The neoliberal counter-revolution reversed this historical trend and got the re-distribution to start working the other way round: move income away from labour and towards property owners and the top wage-earners (managers, technocrats, CEOs, etc.). Probably nothing demonstrates this better than the evolution of wage income, i.e., the income of the working people in the U.S. over the last few decades. Let us take a look.
Chart 3 presents some relevant data on wage income. The first graph in Chart 3, the top-left graph, plots the time series of the average annual real wage in the US economy for the period 1970 to 2005. Average annual real wage is computed from the National Income and Product Account data as the ratio of total wages and salaries and the number of full-time employees; to take account of inflation over the years, the wage has been expressed in 2006 prices. [12] The average annual wage, as shown in the graph, increased from about $38,000 (2006 $) to $47,670 (2006 $). So, did workers really increase their average incomes during the last three decades? The answer is no.
The picture presented in the graph is misleading. The average annual wage in the graph has been computed by including the wages and salaries not only of production workers but also of supervisory workers and managers and CEOs. The “wages and salaries” that accrue to the latter category of “workers” cannot be considered wages in the strict sense of the word; this income comes out of the economic surplus created by production workers. Thus, from a societal viewpoint, income of managers, bureaucrats, CEOs and other such employees are a deduction out of the the total social surplus. Hence, to get a better and more accurate picture of the evolution of what would normally be called wage income, we need to look at the wages of production workers. [13]
The second graph in Chart 3, the top-right graph, plots the time series of weekly real wages of production and non-supervisory workers in the nonfarm business sector of the US economy for the period 1964 to 2009. This data – relating to the production workers in mining, logging and manufacturing, construction workers in construction and non-supervisory workers in the service sector – is taken from the website of the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics and is expressed in 1982 prices to remove the effect of price increases (i.e., has been deflated by the consumer price index for all urban consumers with a base year of 1982). Here, we see a remarkable trend, a trend that really explains the secret of neoliberalism: real weekly wages of production and non-supervisory workers fell between 1964 and 2009. True, there was a slight recovery starting from the mid-1990s, but that has not managed to take the real wage back to the level of 1964, let alone the higher level of the early 1970s. Real weekly wages in 1964 was about $314 (1982 $); in 2009, it was about $287 (1982 $). Moreover it is clear that the recovery that had started in the mid-1990s will be pretty difficult to sustain in the midst of the deepest recession since the Great Depression.
Thus, the upward movement of average annual real wages that is depicted in the first graph of Chart 3 is really driven by increases of the “wages and salaries” of non-production and supervisory “workers”, the fraction of the working or middle class that derives its income as a deduction from the surplus value generated by production workers. This would imply a growing inequality even among the ranks of the wage earners.
And that is precisely what is depicted in the third and fourth graph in Chart 3, the bottom-left and bottom-right graphs. Let us look at them one at a time. The bottom-left graph plots the ratio of two quantities: (a) the average annual real pay of the top 100 CEOs in the Forbes survey of the top 800 CEOs (in terms of pay), and (b) the average annual real wage in the U.S. economy (the data that has been plotted in the top-left graph in Chart 3). [14] In 1970, the ratio was about 39; in 2005, it was about 768, coming by way of 1043 in 1999. Thus, in 1970, the average income of the top 100 CEOs was only about 39 times the average annual wage in the economy; in 1999, the average annual income of the top 100 CEOs had become 1043 times the average annual wage in the economy!
The bottom-right graph plots the average real pay of the rank 10 CEO (in 2006$), i.e., the pay of the 10th CEO from the top when all CEOs are ranked according to their incomes. The real pay of the rank 10 CEO in 1970 was about $1.87 million (2006$); in 2005, the corresponding figure was $73.24 million (2006$), having climbed down from an astronomical $109 million (2006$) in 1999. That is more than a 50 fold increase in 19 years!
CHART 3
Thus, neoliberalism not only increased the share of property income (in aggregate national income) but also increased the share of income that accrues to the hangers-on of capitalism, the managers, the supervisors, the technocrats, the bureaucrats, in short the class of people who oversee and facilitate the extraction of surplus value from the working class, and contribute to the reproduction of capitalist relations of production.
How did this impact on the working class and the macro economy? Since real wages were stagnant or even falling, the working class that had become used to increasing consumption levels over previous decades had to be fed with an ever exploding mountain of debt. First the dot-com bubble and then the housing bubble partly facilitated this process. The growing debt kept consumption levels of the working class growing even, but only at the cost of increasing the financial fragility of the macro economy. When the housing bubble burst towards the end of 2006, that started off the financial crisis.
(I would like to thank Debarshi Das, Panayiotis T. Manolakos and Sirisha Naidu for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of the article. The usual disclaimers apply.)
[11] Dumenil, G. and D. Levy. 2004. Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution. Harvard University Press.
[12] This data is from Saez and Piketty.
[13] Production workers, as we have used the term here, is related to though not strictly equivalent to what is referred to as “productive workers” in Marxian political economy
[14] Average annual wages are in 2006$ and average CEO pay is in 2006$; hence, the exact ratios might a little off the mark though the trend will certainly be fairly accurate.
The following article on the present rise in prices of sugar has been written by Kobad Ghandy, the CPI (Maoist) leader now lodged in Ward No. 8 of Tihar Jail No. 3. Though suffering from prostrate cancer and incarcerated in prison he retains an alert mind as is reflected in the following article sent specially for publication in this journal (Mainstream).
At Rs 50 per kg sugar prices have never been so high. With sugar prices soaring, prices of all sugar linked products—sweets, mithais, tea etc.—have also sky-rocketed. Not only will festivals for most become a drab affair, children’s wailing for the little sweet or toffee will get louder. At the rate at which sugar prices have been rising it will be out of reach of many a poor and middle-class life.
One would have thought, given the free-market mantra of the rulers, that high sugar prices would at least convert into higher prices for the producers—the fifty million sugarcane farmers. But that was not to be; the so-called free market functions only to benefit big business, traders and politicians. In this case both the producers and consumers are being crushed by the cane and sugar pricing policies of the government dictated by the millers and international sugar cartels.
It is indeed a policy that has resulted in windfall profits for a few at the cost of millions of farmers and crores of consumers. And the solution being suggested—huge duty free imports—will help no one except the importers, the foreign traders and the bureaucrats/politicians who will get their commissions on each order. The entire people of our country are made to suffer so that a few may make fortunes. This is indeed tragic.
And while the entire people suffer the politics of sugar is diverting the entire issue with the Central and UP governments throwing the blame on each other.
Farmers being Crushed
In October last year the Ministry of Consumer Affairs (Food and Public Distribution) changed the pricing regime for sugarcane and introduced a Fair and Remunerative Price (FRP) mechanism, replacing the Statutory Minimum Price (SMP) system that was prevailing till then. Soon after passing the ordinance the Central Government declared an FRP to the millers to purchase sugarcane at Rs 130 per quintal, when, according to the NAFA (National Alliance of Farmers’ Association), the input cost of one quintal of sugarcane is roughly Rs 233.5 per quintal. This FRP therefore amounts to a massive loss to the farmer.
Immediately after the announcement, farmers (from UP) took to the streets stopping rail and road traffic. They marched to Parliament. They seized trains that sought to bring imported raw sugar and prevented them from reaching the mills. Some took the extreme step of self-immolation. Others burnt their crop. With the rabi season approaching many resorted to distress sales, selling their crop to local gur manufacturers at Rs 155 per quintal. Under pressure from the farmers the UP Government banned the import of raw sugar.
According to the new order, the FRP shall be fixed by the Central Government from time to time. It also specified that any other authority fixing a price for the crop above the FRP would have to bear the difference. (The latter point was retracted after the farmers’ march to Parliament.) The practice so far was for States such as UP, Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Haryana to declare the State Advised Price (SAP) that mills are required to pay farmers. This was usually higher than the SMP which was announced by the Central Government on the basis of the cost of cultivation estimated by the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP).
As it is, for a number of years, sugarcane growers have been squeezed by the low prices paid by the millers and the spiralling input costs. This has led even to many suicides of sugarcane farmers who had at one time earned a good amount for the crop. In fact in the four years from 2004-05 to 2008-09 the SMP for sugarcane barely rose from Rs 79 per quintal to Rs 81 per quintal while input costs increased phenomenally. In addition, the millers cheat the farmers in varied ways—weighing, recovery rate etc. So it is not surprising that sugar production dropped drastically from 27.8 million tonnes in 2007-08 to 16 million tonnes last year. In the coming year production is not likely to be more than 15 million tonnes.
The government did not create a buffer stock in 2006-07 and 2007-08 when production was at its peak. In 2006 when international prices were high (Rs 20,680 per tonne) and local prices were low (Rs 13,000 per tonne) the government banned exports. At that time due to large stocks and ban of exports the millers harassed the farmers paying them late. In 2007-08 when international prices crashed to Rs 13,000 per tonne the government exported 68 lakh tonnes of sugar even though sugar production was dropping. Later when there was shortage the government imported sugar at Rs 10-35 per kg.
It is these shortsighted policies of the government which have played havoc with the lives of the sugarcane farmers. In its report for 2008-09 the CACP warned the government that unless it raised the SMP for sugarcane the net area under the crop would continue to fall. But the government could not be bothered. They expect the millers will import raw sugar and continue to make money. The area under sugarcane cultivation dropped from 4.38 million hectares last year to 4.21 million hectares—that is, a drop of about 1.5 lakh hectares in just one year. Farmers are shifting away from sugarcane cultivation.
Consumers Robbed
Sugar prices have tripled in the last one year from Rs 17 per kg a year back to Rs 50 today. In just the last four months it has risen by over 40 per cent from Rs 32 per kg. Notwithstanding the claims of the Agriculture Minister, sugar prices are unlikely to drop. When production is estimated at a mere 15 million tonnes and consumption at 23 million tonnes without a single kg of buffer stock (compared to 10 MT at the beginning of last year), the price will be determined by the cost of imports. Given the shortfall, a minimum of eight million tonnes will have to be imported.
The raw sugar import cost to the miller will not be less than Rs 38 per kg. With such high costs, what the consumer has to pay is not likely to be below Rs 50 per kg. And with India entering the international market with huge purchases, the international prices are only likely to go up—expected to be up to Rs 70 per kg.
The question that arises is that when the millers are paying Rs 13 per kg to the farmer (FRP rate with recovery at 10 per cent) why should sugar be so expensive? Even if we calculate that for every kg of sugar produced the transportation and processing charges come to Rs 5, the cost of production would be a maximum of Rs 18 per kg. If we add another one-third as profit the selling price comes to Rs 24. Then if we count the wholesaler’s/ retailer’s profit sugar should not cross a maximum figure of Rs 30 per kg. Then why Rs 50? Even if they give the sugarcane grower the rate that is remunerative—say, Rs 23 per kg or Rs 230 per quintal for sugarcane—the maximum price to the consumer will come to Rs 40 per kg. This would be still less than the cost of imported sugar or raw sugar.
So there is no reason for sugar prices to sky-rocket as millers continue to pay a price lower than the remunerative price. Though this may vary from State to State the plight of the farmer in the two main sugarcane growing States—UP and Maharashtra—is pathetic. In Maharashtra, sugar mills are cooperatives dominated and controlled by powerful politicians like Sharad Pawar. In Maharashtra, every farmer is tied to a particular cooperative mill and is not free to sell it to any other. So they are at the mercy of the cooperative bosses who keep the prices of sugarcane low. In UP many mills are owned by big business houses like Birla, Bajaj etc.
Depending on imports is no solution to the sugar problem—whether shortage or high prices. The only solution must be to promote sugarcane production by investing in agriculture and subsidising the farmer. In this way not only would the farmer and rural economy flourish, the consumer too would get sugar at a reliable price.
Need for a Pro-active Agrarian Policy
With nine lakh tonnes of imported sugar stuck at the ports since the last month due to the UP Government’s ban on processing it, the Centre has been blaming the Mayawati Government for the high sugar prices. The Mayawati Government, on the other hand, instead of announcing a high SAP, has clamped cases on the millers under the Essential Commodities Act in order to share the booty made by them. The plight of the millions of sugarcane farmers and crores of consumers is not on the mind either of the Congress or the BSP. They are interested in only extracting their share of the windfall profits being made by the millers, cooperatives, big traders and hoarders.
The only policy that would benefit both the producer and consumer is for the government to invest heavily in agriculture and subsidise sugarcane production. Sugarcane production requires large quantities of water, so irrigation projects should be its first focus. Unfortunately the government has systematically been cutting investment in agriculture. Rural development expenditure of the government averaged 14.5 per cent of the GDP in the 1985-90 period. This dropped to eight per cent in the early 1990s and since 1998 it has dropped even further to a mere 5.6 per cent of the GDP. In real terms, there has been a reduction of about Rs 30,000 crores annually in development expenditures on average in the first five years of this century compared to the pre-reform period.
When investment in agriculture should be increasing as it is there that the bulk of our population live, the above figures indicate a massive reduction with disastrous consequences. Rather than become dependent on imports and thereby compromise the food security of the country, the government needs to invest heavily in agriculture (with focus on irrigation) to boost the production of sugarcane and other crops.
To solve the sugar/sugarcane problem the government needs to increase investment in irrigation, subsidise input cost (fertiliser, pesticide, electricity) and ensure a remunerative price is paid to the farmer. To maintain consumer prices it should put a halt on the profiteering, hoarding and illegal methods of the millers and subsidise sugar particularly for the poor. If the government can announce a massive bail-out to the three-to-four oil companies and Air India, why does it shy away from bailing-out 50 million farmers and a few crore masses? The amounts being suggested to the three-to-four oil companies and Air India run up to Rs 20,000 crores, a lesser amount would be needed for the millions of sugarcane farmers.
February 19, 2010 — Correo del Orinoco — In Venezuela, people know what the 3Rs stand for: revise, rectify and re-impulse. Like Karl Marx, who stressed that the revolution advances by criticising itself, President Hugo Chavez has argued that it is necessary to recognise errors and to go beyond them in order to advance.
But who knows what the four Rs of global capitalism are? At the recent meeting in Davos, Switzerland, of the wheelers and dealers of global capitalism, the conference theme was “Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild — Improve the State of the World”. But what did they do? Although we don’t know what happened in their dinner meetings (which, as Adam Smith wisely observed, inevitably end up in a conspiracy against the public), there doesn’t appear to be much sign that they improved the state of the world. Of course, there was never a question that these corporate giants and their faithful servants would rethink the logic of capital — a logic of exploitation, expansion of capital, unending generation of needs and consumerism, and the destruction of what Marx called the original sources of wealth, human beings and nature. How could they? But did they redesign and rebuild in order to improve the state of the world for capital?
Not noticeably. However, that doesn’t mean they have not already been advancing on their real 3Rs. To improve the state of world capitalism, Reverse has become a major theme — especially in the western hemisphere. Given the growing rejection of neoliberalism and global capitalism that has been occurring in Latin America, given the inroads that have been made by a new conception of national sovereignty, international solidarity and socialism for the 21st century, capital sees the need to reverse those advances. Honduras, the Colombian military bases, subversion in Paraguay, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela — all this is capital’s effort to improve the state of its world.
Of course, as we know, global capitalism has had its problems lately — the economic crisis, which is the result of a long process of overaccumulation. And so, it is indeed engaged in a process of redesigning or, rather, Restructuring. It is important to recognise that a crisis in capitalism is not the same as a crisis of capitalism. For a crisis in capitalism to become a crisis of capitalism, you need actors who are prepared to put an end to capitalism. There is, though, no sign of that in the immediate future. And so, like before, capital will proceed to restructure itself. After the depression of the 1930s, capital restructured itself internationally through the Bretton Woods agreements that created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. We can already see a similar attempt underway with the shift from the G7 to the G20 — in other words, the incorporation of new emerging capitalist powers such as the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China). And, international capital clearly hopes that through this process of restructuring in which it brings the new important capitalist actors to the head table for international discussions, it will be able to resume its process of growth in accordance with the logic of capital. Reverse, Restructure and Resume — these are the 3Rs that global capitalism wants.
However, there is a fourth R of global capitalism. The very solution to the crisis that capital introduces — that restructuring which brings the emerging capitalist countries to the central committee — implies the right of the latter to be full members, i.e., to achieve levels of consumption and economic development equal to the present levels of the North. Yet we know that the world’s resources and the Earth itself cannot possibly sustain this. And in this situation of true scarcity, how can capitalism solve this?
Capitalism, after all, is a system in which all capitals are trying to expand as much as possible. However, it is not a system in which all its members march in unison; and, as Lenin explained in relationship to World War I, the combination of uneven rates of development and scarcity is a major source of conflict among capitalist countries. In this situation, the new emerging powers want the fourth R– Redivision. Redivision of resources, redivision of industrialisation, redivision of the right to emit carbon — the struggle is on. It is a struggle over access by capital to scarce resources, energy, water and food.
Clearly, in this world of immense inequality, exclusion and starvation, redivision is necessary if we are ever to realise the ideal embodied in the Bolivarian Constitution of Venezuela of the importance of ensuring the overall human development of all people. We want a world, a socialist world, in which (as Marx and Engels stressed) “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. But, capitalist redivision is a process of struggle over the right to exploit. It is a struggle not only among capitals but also against the exploited and excluded of the world.
Who would doubt that this struggle will become more intense as the logic of unremitting capitalist expansion comes up against the reality of natural limits? The slogan writers for Davos were right. We do need to “Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild — Improve the State of the World”. And, we need to redivide, too — to create a world without capitalism. As Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez continue to remind us, humanity is faced with a critical choice — socialism or barbarism?
[This article first appeared in the February 19, 2010, issue of Correo del Orinoco, the new weekly English-language newspaper published in Venezuela.]
Last week, India’s “wall street journal”, Mint, brought out an interesting editorial entitled, “Proletariat, a misleading idea“ (posted on December 29). In the editorial of a business newspaper meant for stockmarketeers and businessmen, what else do you expect on a conceptual matter? First it will trivialise the concept, mostly because of the authors’ ignorance, but sometimes for conscious propaganda too.
In the editorial a historical snapshot of the usage of the term, “proletariat”, is presented – underdog (during the industrial revolution), obsolete (due to Western welfarism), buried (after the cold war), renewal (during the recent “upswing in industrial unrest”). Ultimately, the argument is simple that the workers’ problems must not be posed as matters of class struggle (“conflict between managements and labour”), rather they should be left entirely to free market “competition between firms” with full freedom to hire and fire, which will eventually resolve everything. And also don’t talk about “rights” because they politicise the workplace, obstructing a free competition between firms. Don’t talk of unionisation – let the bosses continue to scramble freely for golden pie in market growth, and you wait open mouthed for flying crumbs to fall. That’s the message.
This message is understandable, but I was still surprised why such an urgency to call “proletariat, a misleading idea” – does it really need an editorial to be devoted upon? Casually, I continued browsing Mint’s website for other pieces on labour matters, and I found out the reason. There was an elaborate report on the labour unrest in the auto industry which was posted the previous day (December 28): “The rise of the new proletariat“. It provides a decent backgrounder (decent in comparison to other news reports on labour issues) on the recent industrial unrest in India. In fact, Maitreyee Handique’s (the reporter) has been sensitively presenting the labour side of industrial relations in India. She quotes a Trade Union leader in this particular report:
“Today, my boys are educated. They know how to use computers. They are not going to (sit by) and watch exploitation”.
So these “boys” constitute the “new proletariat”!
Further,
So what’s different about this wave of trade union activity? Timing. It comes as the world is emerging from a financial crisis that marks an inflection point in its industrial development. As the world’s fastest-growing economy after China—and one that sailed through the economic crisis relatively unscathed—India is poised to become one of the powerhouses that pulls everybody else out of the trough.
Take India’s automobile sector—it’s helping to define the future of the global car industry by churning out the low-priced models that are propelling growth as markets elsewhere lose steam. It’s also one of the key fronts on which workers are fighting companies, which explains why the stakes are so high.
And more,
In other nations, such as Malaysia, contract workers are actually paid more because they don’t have job security, said C.S. Venkataratnam, director at the International Management Institute in New Delhi.
“Here (in India), the typical argument is that workers are not qualified,” he said. “In India, we do not pay premium, but discounted wages, for quality.”
Workers say lopsided numbers at many companies – a small regular workforce dwarfed by a larger group of contract hires that’s being constantly retrenched and replenished – render it impossible to register demands and make management responsive.
However, the reporter is determined not to take sides and end the report with an employer’s view:
Kapur said the trouble at the factory was “politically motivated by outside influences”, without elaborating. He accused the unions of trying to create an atmosphere in which industry wouldn’t be able to survive, saying that this had already happened in the two states where the communists are holding power.
“Kolkata and Kerala don’t have industries, and now it’s starting in Gurgaon,” Kapur said.
Despite this balancing between the perspectives of labour and capital in the report, it seems the title “The Rise of the New Proletariat” was quite chilling for the business community, and the very next day the editors, who sensed this, felt the need to target the very two issues that the above report brought out:
“the disparity in wages between contract and permanent employees and difficulties in forming unions at workplaces.”
And they found India’s new chief economic advisor, Kaushik Basu’s statement authoritative enough to correct the damage done.
Further, Mint in the end had to assure its readers:
“Today, the nature of work in modern economies is very different from what it was in the Victorian age. Many workers in the same firm don’t even work together. The idea of a proletariat rests on shared experiences at a workplace. That is a fiction even in assembly line manufacturing today. A gentle draught of economic reason is enough to evaporate a politically evocative expression.”
It seems that the very Idea of Proletariat is dangerous, it smacks of class struggle, it (mis)leads workers to unrest leaving the capitalists distraught.
The Global Hunger Index (GHI), calculated by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), ranks countries on a 100-point scale, with zero being the best score having no hunger and 100 being the worst. This index gives an indication of how successful the country has been, relative to others, in dealing with the extremely important problem of hunger of the vast majority of its citizens.
Why use such an index? This is how the IFPRI website explains the rationale for calculating the Global Hunger Index:
Countries can gauge their economic performance by looking at gross domestic product, but to assess their progress on fighting hunger, they must usually consider a multitude of indicators. To provide a simple way of ranking countries and illustrating trends in hunger worldwide, IFPRI developed a Global Hunger Index (GHI). The index captures three dimensions of hunger: insufficient availability of food, shortfalls in the nutritional status of children, and child mortality. Using data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the index ranks countries on a 100-point scale, with 0 being the best score (no hunger) and 100 being the worst. By highlighting this information, the index is designed to help mobilize political will and promote effective policies for combating hunger.
The recently released figures of the Global Hunger Index for 2009 says that countries that have scored between 20 and 30 points are in an alarming condition. What is India’s score? 23.90!
There is more. India is ranked 65 in a group of 88 countries. Countries like Uganda (which is ranked 38th), Mauritania (with a rank of 40) and Zimbabwe ( which is ranked 58th) and many others have a better record than India on this front. To see what this means let us do some simple comparisons between India and Zimbabwe.
In 2008, India’s GDP was 3.304 trillion $ (PPP); Zimbabwe’s GDP in 2008 was 1.925 billion $ (PPP). Thus, in terms of the total market value of goods and services produced in 2008, India was 1716 times richer than Zimbabwe. Of course India has a much bigger population which needs to be taken account of if the comparison is to be meaningful. So let us look at GDP per person: India, in 2008, had a GDP per capita of 2,900 $ (PPP); Zimbabwe, in 2008, had a GDP per capita of 200 $ (PPP). Thus, Zimbabwe is about 14 times poorer than India in terms of the market value of goods and services it produces annually, even after taking account of population differences, but it has been better able to deal with the problem of hunger! Shouldn’t Indian policy makers be proud of themselves?
Now compare this to a set of figures, from the World Wealth Report, that had been released a few days ago: in 2009, India had 52 billionaires, with the richest, Mukesh Ambani, having a net worth of $ 32 billion. The combined net worth of the richest 100 Indians in 2009 was US$ 276 billion; their Chinese counterparts had a combined net worth of US$ 170 billion. To make the comparison meaningful recall that China’s GDP in 2008 was $ 7.992 trillion (PPP) while India’s GDP in 2008 was only $ 3.304 trillion (PPP): wealth is far more concentrated at the top in India than it is in China (the other emerging super power).
Let me summarize: (1) compared to most other countries in the world, the condition of the poor in India is abysmal; a simple comparison is the rank by the Global Hunger Index (GHI); according to the 2009 GHI, India is far worse than Zimbabwe in terms of hunger; (2) compared to most other countries in the world, the position and weight of the super rich in India has “improved” beyond imagination; this is captured nicely by the fact that wealth is far more concentrated at the top in India than it is in China, the fastest growing country in the world.
Doesn’t this give a good illustration of how India is emerging as a new global power?
1) Stagnant industrial (especially manufacturing) wages for the last three decades;
2) An urban-biased approach to development leading to a “prolonged ‘limitless’ supply of labour”.
By bankrupting the rural economy, China has pumped up its urban industrial growth, trade surplus and financial capital.
This is how China lured global capital, even from other East Asian economies, which consequently put China at the helm of East Asian capitalism. But the same strategy has made China dependent on the ups and downs of the global (esp., American) economy. Cheap labour and rural bankruptcy, which constitute the basis of Chinese growth, cannot provide a viable domestic demand structure for the growth to sustain during a global recession. Further, the rise of the Coastal bourgeoisie and their cohorts within the Communist Party will not allow demand stimulus which brings about structural changes challenging their political-economic hegemony.
The “capitalist roaders” in China are fully entrenched within the State and Party, so “class struggle within the party” will not be enough, a new full-fledged Chinese Revolution is what is called for.
Rising continuously for the last 30 months, the official unemployment rate in the US economy crossed over to double-digit territory in October 2009. According to figures released recently by the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, the official unemployment rate in the US was 10.2 percent in October 2009; this is the first time in 26 years that the official unemployment rate has crossed 10 percent in the US. But the official measure is a gross underestimation of the reality of joblessness in the US. A more sensible measure, which takes into account the “discouraged” and part-time workers, stood at 17.5 percent!
The November 6, 2009 Fact Sheet from the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank in the US provides more interesting facts about the US economy, especially relevant for working-class people; below I provide some of the entries from the above fact sheet as a summary of important facts about several neglected dimensions of the US economy:
Historical context
• Current unemployment rate (October 2009): 10.2%
• Current underemployment rate, including people who have been unable to find full-time work and are working either
part time or not at all: 17.5%
• Number of consecutive months of job loss during this recession: 22
• Last time the United States saw 10.2% unemployment: April 1983
• Number of months double-digit unemployment lasted during the 1980s recession: 10
• Peak rate of unemployment during the recession in 2001: 5.5%
• Number of months that passed after the 2001 recession had officially ended before unemployment peaked, at 6.3%: 19
Current recession
• Ratio of job seekers to job openings when the current recession began: 1.7 to 1
• Ratio of job seekers to job openings today: 6.3 to 1
• Total number of jobs lost during the current recession: 8.1 million
• Number of people who have been unemployed for more than six months: 5.6 million
• Jobs needed to return to pre-recession employment levels when population growth is factored in: 10.9 million
Demographic data
• Current unemployment rate for black workers: 15.7%
• Current unemployment rate for Hispanic workers: 13.1%
• Current unemployment rate for white workers: 9.5%
• Current unemployment rate for men: 11.4%
• Current unemployment rate for women: 8.8%
• State with the highest unemployment: Michigan, 15.3%
• State with the lowest unemployment: North Dakota, 4.2%
• State showing the largest portion of job loss during this recession: Arizona, 10%
• Unemployment rate among black workers in Michigan: 23.9%
• Unemployment rate among white workers in Michigan: 13.7%
• Unemployment rate for college-educated workers: 4.7%
• Unemployment rate for workers who did not complete high school: 15.5%
Related economic data
• Number of Americans with no health insurance in 2008: 46.3 million
• Number of Americans projected to have no health insurance by 2010: more than 50 million
• Percent of U.S. population living in poverty in 2008: 13.2%
• Percent of U.S. children living in poverty in 2008: 19%
• Percent of African American children living in poverty in 2008: 34.7%
• Portion of African American children expected to be living in poverty in the coming years, as a result of higher unemployment: more than half
“So, if you are not employed by the financial industry (94 percent of you are not), don’t worry. The current unemployment rate of 6.1 percent is not alarming, and we should reconsider whether it is worth it to spend $700 billion to bring it down to 5.9 percent.”
That was Casey B. Mulligan, Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, writing in the New York Times on October 09, 2008 about what he then considered to be a robust economy. The official unemployment rate for the economy that Professor Mulligan was writing about, the U.S. economy, steadily climbed since he shared his wisdom with the world; according to the latest figures released by the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics, the official unemployment rate stood at 9.8 percent in September 2009. Despite the best wishes of Professor Mulligan and his colleagues at the University of Chicago, the unemployment rate has decided to move in the opposite direction. According to all sensible estimates, it will cross 10 percent by the end of 2009 and stay close to that figure for the next year. Even this high figure for the official unemployment rate does not capture the true degree of labour under-utilization currently afflicting the U.S. economy. A more comprehensive measure of labour under-utilization that takes account of discouraged workers who have dropped out of the labour force and part-time workers who are searching for full-time employment stands at 17 percent!
What is of course interesting is that the school of macroeconomics popularised by Professor Mulligan’s distinguished colleagues at the University of Chicago and elsewhere known as the Real Business Cycle (RBC) view of macroeconomics does not even recognize existence of unemployment. In case you have missed that, let me state it again: for the RBC view of macroeconomics, unemployment, as we understand that term, is a fiction; it does not exist. So, how does this strand of macroeconomics view the fluctuations of employment that goes with the typical business cycle? Here is the story they tell.
Every worker derives “utility” (don’t ask what that means) both from consumption and leisure. Now, to finance consumption expenditures, she must work because that is how she can earn her wage income. By working, of course, the worker gives up precious leisure and so experiences dis-utility (again, don’t ask what that means or how it can be measured). It is, therefore, the balancing of the extra – marginal in the language of economists – utility derived from the next unit of consumption and the dis-utility associated with giving up that last bit of leisure that determines whether the worker wants to work or not and for how many hours a week (say).
But the worker, as every other agent in the RBC models, are endowed with enormous computing powers; they not only look at the present, they also peer into the depths of the infinite future. It is thus that the balancing of marginal utility and dis-utility takes on an inter-temporal dimension. Depending on the changing incentives to work in different time periods, the worker decides how much labour to supply, i.e., how many hours she wishes to work. The level of employment, and by definition unemployment, is therefore, in the RBC view, driven by changes in the incentives to work; employment is a choice that workers make. There is no unemployment, only equilibrium fluctuation of employment chosen by workers inter-temporally balancing the marginal utility of consumption against the dis-utility of work. According to this view, then, unemployment occurs because workers decide not to take up the offers they get, i.e., when unemployment is observed it is because the workers choose to remain unemployed.
There is a hidden assumption here: enough jobs are available to workers, in the first place, to choose from. What if enough jobs are not available? How will workers then choose from jobs that are not even available? Would it then still be possible to claim that fluctuations in unemployment are merely the result of inter-temporal optimization exercises on the part of workers balancing marginal utility of consumption against the dis-utility of work. Evidently not. So, how would we test whether the RBC view of unemployment is borne out by facts? If unemployment is “chosen” by workers, as the RBC view claims, then the number of job seekers and job openings should not deviate too much from each other and certainly not for prolonged periods of time; if, on the other hand, unemployment is forced on workers by the hiring decisions of capitalists, the the ratio of job seekers to job openings should increase secularly during recessions. What does the evidence in this regard show?
The Chart plots, for the U.S. economy, the ratio of (a) number of job seekers, and (b) the number of job openings. In December 2000, the ratio was close to 1; thus, in December 2000, every worker looking for a job had, on average, a job available. In December 2007, when the Great Recession started, the ratio stood at 1.7, i.e., on average, every job opening had 1.7 job seekers. As the recession progresses, the ratio climbed steadily and by August 2009, it stood at 6.3. Hence, in August 2009, every job opening had, on average, about 6.3 job seekers. Thus, the ratio continually increased for 20 months, and will possibly continue to do so for the next few months. What do you say, isn’t that evidence in support of the RBC view?
On a visit to the London School of Economics last year, the Queen of England, expressed surprise at the apparent failure of the economics profession to predict the financial crisis and the Great Recession that came in its wake. “Why did no one see this coming?” asked the Queen to Luis Garicano, a professor of economics at LSE. Garicano’s colleague and economist Tim Besley and eminent historian of government Paul Hennessy stepped up to the task and attempted to answer the Queen in a short letter [PDF] written to her on behalf of the British Academy. In the letter they concluded that “the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis and to head it off, while it had many causes, was principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole.”
Post-Keynesian economist, Thomas Palley, called out the narrow vision of the Besley-Hennesy letter. According to Palley, the cause of the failure cannot be ascribed to the failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, whatever that might mean; instead the failure should be located in the unique “sociology of the economics profession,” which has hounded out most dissenting voices. This failure, moreover, “was a long time in the making and was the product of the profession becoming increasingly arrogant, narrow, and closed minded” and excluding all who did not adhere to the dominant ideological construction of mainstream economics. Interestingly, Palley also points to a host of articles written from a heterodox perspective which spelt out the seriousness of the problems facing the economy as early as 2006; of course, the mainstream media, the US administration and the mainstream economics profession did not heed their advice.
In July 2009, the London-based Economist, the most sophisticated and well-informed voice of capital, ran a series of articles on the problems ailing the discipline of economics. The series took a hard and critical look, always from the perspective of keeping the long-term inst rests of capital protected, at both macroeconomics and financial economics, the two branches of economics at the very center of the current crisis; it all began, one must remember, as a financial crisis – the bursting of the housing bubble, the collapse of investment banks, the falling stock market, the seizing up of the credit markets – and quickly turned into what commentators have started calling the Great Recession.
Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago is one of the key architects of recent mainstream macroeconomics, the founder and propagator of the so-called rational expectations “revolution” in economics. In the Chicago vision of the macro economy, all economic actors are super rational. How do they display their rational behaviour? By making decisions on the basis of all currently available and relevant information. In other words, all economic agents are magically endowed with unbelievably large computing capacities whereby they gather all the relevant information, process it at lightning speed and arrive at perfect decisions. In this world there are no manias, no panics, no herd behaviour, no contagion, no asset price bubbles, no crashes; there is only smooth and rational adjustments. If the real world of capitalism does not resemble this, so much the worse for the world! Unfazed, therefore, by the recent economic and financial crisis, Robert Lucas jumped in to defend the recent turn in macroeconomics: even mildly critical pieces in as friendly a journal as the Economist needed to be countered. His contribution, of course, started off a Lucas round table, which, by the way, has some interesting posts (for instance Smither’s post on why the Efficient Markets Hypothesis must be discarded).
University of Chicago economists are notorious for their devotion to the magic of the market. In what even then looked like a wacky position, Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago, a colleague of Lucas, had argued in early October that the economy was not doing as bad as it looked; the unemployment rate was only about 6 percent and so there was no need either to worry or for the government to work out a fiscal stimulus. Today when the official unemployment rate is nudging double digits and most sensible economists believe that it will remain high for the next year or so, making this the deepest recession since the Great Depression, Mulligan’s position, and the Chicago position in general, seems so horrendously out of touch with reality.
A detour into some details of how the unemployment rate is measured in the US might not be out of place. To start with, one must recall that one of the most serious problems that any capitalist economy, like the US, faces is to provide well-paying stable employment for its working population. The inherent logic of capitalism usually prevents this problem being solved in any satisfactory manner and for long periods of time. Hence, capitalist economies are typically plagued by serious labour underutilization.
There are several ways to measure labour underutilization and the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) in the US currently uses six measures (U-1 through U-6). Data for these measures come from two monthly surveys conducted by the BLS: (1) the Current Population Survey (which is a survey of about 60,000 households); (2) the Current Employment Statistics Survey (which is a survey of about 160,000 business and government agencies). For both surveys, as explained on the BLS website, the data for a given month relate to a particular week or pay period. For the household survey, “the reference week is generally the calendar week that contains the 12th day of the month.” For the establishment survey, on the other hand, “the reference period is the pay period including the 12th, which may or may not correspond directly to the calendar week.”
It has been known for quite some time now that the official unemployment rate (the U-3 measure) provides us with a seriously underestimated measure of labour underutilization. The reason is simple: U-3 does not count those workers who become so discouraged by long spells of unemployment that they stop looking for work altogether, drop out of the labour force and, therefore, not even counted among the unemployed. To deal with this problem, the BLS provides a more comprehensive measure of labour underutilization, U-6, which takes account of part-time workers (who want but cannot find full time jobs) and marginally attached workers (these are the “persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past”). While the official unemployment rate is 9.7 percent (see chart below), the current value of U-6 is a whopping 16.8 percent! And this despite the massive fiscal stimulus of the Obama administration. How about asking an unemployed worker who has not found a job for the last 15 months (say), and has possibly even stopped looking for one due to sheer discouragement, whether her being unemployed is the result of a “rational” decision she has made on the basis of some inter temporal calculations?
At the other end of the mainstream economics profession, liberal economist, Nobel Laureate and New York Times commentator Paul Krugman has written a balanced and even-handed critique of the recent turn in macroeconomics, precisely the turn that Lucas so painstakingly tries to defend. Krugman makes two points: (1) how the orthodox belief in the efficiency of the markets (and especially financial markets) is neither based on facts nor makes for good policy; (2) how and why fiscal policy, long banished from the realms of mainstream macroeconomics, came to the rescue in the Great Recession, i.e., in preventing the Great Recession from turning into the second Great Depression, and why it should become part of the mainstream curriculum again. Krugman ends with a plea to return to the deep wisdom of Keynes, knowing full well that Keynes’ efforts were all directed at reforming capitalism and not replacing it . Even this mild reproach drew fire from Chicago economist, John Cochrane; in his post, Cochrane has, to my mind, not managed to respond to any of the substantive points raised by Krugman. Much along Krugman’s line is also the recent piece by Robert Skidelsky, Keynes’ biographer and the recent interview of macroeconomist Robert Gordon of Northwestern University; in a similar tone, Richard Posner asks whether economists will escape a whipping; no prizes for guessing the answer. For more debates along similar lines see this page on the Financial Times.
As an interesting aside, there was an earlier round of debate between Krugman/De Long and Cochrane. Early in the year, Cochrane had written a piece on why fiscal stimulus will not work. In that article, he had basically repeated some pre-Keynesian fallacies (like the Treasury View that every dollar of debt-financed expenditure by the government necessarily cuts back the same amount of private investment expenditure and hence that fiscal stimulus is ineffective). Brad De Long of UC Berkeley and Paul Krugman took Cochrane to task for repeating these fallacies; here is Delong’s piece (which has a nice example on a credit economy with four agents) and here is Krugman’s. Cochrane makes the simple mistake, as Krugman points out, of assuming that the pool of savings is fixed (i.e., before and after the fiscal stimulus), which leads him to conclude that when the government dips into this pool of savings that must necessarily deprive some private entity of an equal amount of saving (and hence reduce private investment expenditure by that amount). It is amazing how this simple fallacy persists over time, despite repeated attempts by Keynesian economists to point it out over the last 60 years. When the government takes a part of the pool of savings available to society and uses it for making purchases, the multiplier effect of this government expenditure increases the output of the economy (especially so when there is massive unutilized capacity lying around) and, thereby, also the savings out of that output; when the multiplier has run its course, the economy has a larger pool of savings. Therefore, debt-financed government expenditure need not crowd out private investment, other than in the case when the economy is already operating near full-capacity, a far cry from the state of the US economy today.
Limitations of the Debate
While this debate between the “saltwater economists” (liberal wing of the mainstream economics profession in the US, located mostly on the two coasts) and the “freshwater economists” (conservative wing of the economics profession in the US, located mostly in the central part of the country) is a welcome break from the free market fundamentalism of the mainstream press, one should not overlook the limitations of the framework within which the debate is being conducted. Roughly speaking, that framework is marked by its two boundaries, on the left by a version of Keynesianism (that economists like Krugman uphold) and on the right by Chicago-style economics. That is the space that is provided in this debate, and thus it naturally excludes: (a) any discussion of a much broader and richer heterodox tradition in economics (which includes Post-Keynesians, Ricardians, Institutionalists, Marxists, etc.), (b) any discussion of the material basis of the victory of freshwater over freshwater economics, and (c) any discussion of alternatives to capitalism.
It is surprising that Krugman does not even once refer in his piece to the heterodox tradition in economics, especially so because he devotes so much space to a discussion of macroeconomics. Over the last two decades, heterodox macroeconomists in the Marxian and post-Keynesian tradition have developed an impressive body of research, both theoretical and empirical, that speaks to most of the issues that mainstream macroeconomics so cleverly avoids. The Classical-Marxian theory of long run economic growth complemented by the short run theory of economic fluctuations of the post-Keynesian variety offers a real, comprehensive and coherent alternative to the theoretical sterility of mainstream macroeconomics, and it is indeed unfortunate that Krugman does not care to engage with this body of research.
When Krugman portrays the victory of freshwater economics over saltwater economics as a seduction of truth by beauty, he misses one very important aspect of that victory. The victory of conservative economics coincides beautifully with the rise to dominance of finance capital, the fraction of the global ruling class most closely allied with and deriving their incomes from the financial sector. How can one miss the coincidence of the exhaustion of the postwar temporary and partial victory of labour over capital and the rise of monetarism, mark I and then mark II? As economist Gerard Dumenil had pointed out long ago, the fads and fashions in mainstream economics is determined less by the internal logic of the discipline than by changes in the structure and functioning of the world economy and the changing correlation of class forces. This is an aspect that commentators like Krugman totally miss.
Talking of alternatives to capitalism, while it is obvious to many economists and activists that the current crisis is a crisis of capitalism, and that it necessitates the search for alternatives to capitalism by linking up with the long socialist tradition, the current debate does not even entertain discussion of such alternatives. While it is expected that freshwater economists will not tolerate any criticism of capitalism, saltwater economists are no less conscious about respecting the commonly accepted boundaries of the thinkable. For one must not forget that Krugman, like Keynes fifty years ago, is out to reform capitalism and not to replace it. And that is as far left as the framework will allow the debate to veer; even thinking about an alternative to capitalism is taboo within the terms of reference of this debate. Socialism is not even allowed to wander, if only by mistake, into the terms of the discourse.
That is the fundamental limitation of the discipline of mainstream economics: its inability to adopt a historical perspective and see capitalism as merely one way of organizing social production, a mode of production with a definite historical birth and therefore with a future historical transcendence. Mainstream economics, to the extent that it ever reflects on the philosophical foundations and founding assumptions of the discipline, sees the “laws” that it discovers as natural laws, valid for all historical epochs. The obvious corollary is that capitalism is eternal; the way things are organized today is how they have always been and will always be. Of course there will be technological progress and institutional development, but there never was nor will ever be any radical qualitative change in the way social production is organized, in the ownership of property. Much before Fukuyama, mainstream economics had silently accepted the non-existence of history.
This is where the Marxist tradition of political economy is far superior to what Marx called “bourgeois economics”. Grounded in a materialist conception of history, the Marxist tradition analyses the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist system, contradictions which cannot be resolved within the parameters of the capitalist system. These contradictions cannot be dealt with by more or less regulation of the financial or product or labour markets, it cannot be dealt with by fiscal or monetary policy to stabilize business cycle fluctuations, it cannot be dealt with by better regulation of international trade and finance; these contradictions, while changing form according to the changing institutional setting of capitalism, will inevitably and recurrently break out on the surface as long as capitalism survives.
What are these fundamental contradictions of capitalism? The contradiction between social production and private appropriation and control of the product of that production process; the contradiction between use-value and value; the contradiction between the two fundamental social classes, workers and capitalists, of capitalist society. While the first of these is easy to grasp and therefore needs no elaboration, it might be worthwhile spending some time thinking about the other two.
For Marx, capitalism was a type, a sub-class, of commodity producing society and so, to understand the dynamics of capitalism, he started his analysis in Volume I of Capital with commodity production. But what is a commodity? Every society must produce to meet its material needs. Where the products of human labour emerge as the private property of economic agents, and which are then exchanged through a process of bargaining, they are called commodities. Another way to see this is to realize that the products of human labour that emerge in a system of production organized through exchange are precisely what Marx calls commodities.
Come to think of it, there are only two ways that human needs can be satisfied in a commodity producing society, either by consuming one’s own product or by exchanging it for something else that one needs. This simple observation immediately throws up the dual nature of commodities. On the one hand every commodity is a use value because it can satisfy human needs; on the other hand, every commodity can also be exchanged for every other commodity. The aspect of exchangeability of commodities is what Marx terms value. What is the essence of the aspect of exchangeability of commodities? The fact that they are all products of human labour. For Marx, therefore, value is created by labour, properly defined, and is expressed in money (value separated from any particular commodity). What has all this to do with capitalism?
Capitalism is the special class of commodity producing society where labour power (the capacity to perform useful human labour) itself becomes a commodity. While a commodity producing society with owner-producers typically “sell to buy”, the characteristic transaction under capitalism is “buy to sell”. A representative capitalist starts with a sum of money, buys raw materials and labour power with it, brings them together in the production process and then sells the products to end up with a sum of money which is larger than the sum he started out with. If we now recall that money is nothing but the expression of value, we see that the capitalist ends up with more value that he started with, in a word surplus value. Capitalism, therefore, is a system of social production, that is governed by the logic of producing surplus value. The production of use values, things that can actually satisfy human needs, is just incidental; as far as capital is concerned, the aim is to produce surplus value by producing no matter what use values. When those use values cannot satisfy existing needs, new and artificial needs can always be “manufactured” by the capitalist media. Value needs to be embodied in use values and yet it is totally indifferent to the existence of particular use values; this is the sense in which use values and value stand in a contradictory relation under capitalism.
What about the contradiction between the fundamental social classes? Every class divided society rests on the appropriation of unpaid surplus labour by the ruling class (or bloc of classes) from the direct producers. In feudal societies, the ruling class directly appropriates the surplus labour of peasants as “labour services”; similarly, in capitalism, the capitalist class appropriates, but now through the institution of wage-labour, the surplus labour of the workers. The apparent freedom and equality (between the two parties to an exchange) guaranteed to workers through the institution of wage-labour and markets makes the appropriation of surplus labour almost invisible; equality of the relations of exchange make the exploitation of the working class difficult to see. But it exists nonetheless and the tools of Marxian political economy brings it to light.
It is these fundamental contradictions that manifest themselves periodically as crises of the system, the most characteristic feature of which is the simultaneous existence of unfulfilled human needs (unemployment) and unused capacity (idle plant and machinery) to fulfill those needs. Capitalism, as a system, is defined by these contradictions, they are not extrinsic to capitalism; hence, only a positive transcendence of the capitalist system can resolve them. It would have been useful if the current crisis of economics was utilized to focus our attention on the crisis of capitalism, but the way the terrain of debate has been circumscribed by agreed upon assumptions, this seems rather unlikely.
(I would like to thank Amit Basole and Debarshi Das for helpful comments on an earlier version.)
David McNally, Professor at York University and leading member of the New Socialist Group (Solidarity’s sister organization in Canada, www.newsocialist.org), talks about the roots of the the financial crisis and its precise role in the worldwide economic downturn–as well as the depth of its social costs. From the Marx and the Global Economic Crisis panel at the 2009 Left Forum in New York.
Anwar Shaikh, Professor at the New School for Social Research, gives a Marxist account of historic fluctuations in the capitalist economy and how the current crisis fits in the overall picture. From the Marx and the Global Economic Crisis panel at Left Forum 2009, New York.
Abstract: This paper uses aggregate-level data as well as case-studies to trace the evolution of some key structural features of the Indian economy, relating both to the agricultural and the informal industrial sector. These aggregate trends are used to infer: (a) the dominant relations of production under which the vast majority of the Indian working people labour, and (b) the predominant ways in which the surplus labour of the direct producers is appropriated by the dominant classes. This summary account is meant to inform and link up with on-going attempts at radically restructuring Indian society.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx.
INTRODUCTION
Assessing the nature and direction of economic development in India is an important theoretical and practical task with profound political and social implications. After all, any serious attempt at a radical restructuring of Indian society, if it is not to fall prey to empty utopianism, will need to base its long-term strategy on the historical trends in the evolution of the material conditions of life of the vast majority of the population. Attempting to contribute to past debates and as part of on-going attempts at radical transformation of Indian society, this paper tries to provide a summary account of the evolution of some key structural features of the Indian economy over the last few decades.
The principal questions that motivate this study are: what types of production relations does the vast majority of the working population in Indian agriculture and industry labor in? How is economic surplus appropriated from the producers? The aim is not merely to arrive at a label such as “capitalist,” “semi-feudal” etc; nor to enter into a debate over whether the transition to capitalism is occurring as expected or not. Rather we are motivated by a desire to understand the material conditions under which the working population labors and the manner in which it is exploited.
The analysis is largely pitched at the aggregate level, complemented, wherever possible, with micro-level studies and data. While a study of the structural evolution of the Indian economy is of interest in itself, this paper uses trends in the structural evolution of the Indian economy to make inferences about the mode of generation, appropriation and use of the surplus product in Indian society.1 The focus on surplus appropriation, in turn, is motivated by the Marxist idea that the form of extraction of unpaid surplus labour provides the key to understanding the structure and evolution of any class-divided society. This important insight was most clearly articulated by Marx in Volume III of Capital:
The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations of production, and hence also its specific political form. It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers – a relationship whose particular form naturally corresponds always to a certain level of development of the type and manner of labour, and hence to its social productive power – in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short the specific form of the state in each case.(page 927, Marx, 1993; emphasis added.)
The emphasis on the form in which surplus labour is extracted from the direct producers is important and worth dwelling on a little. Every class divided society rests on the appropriation of unpaid surplus labour of the direct producers; the fact that one group of people can, due to their location in the process of production, appropriate the surplus labour of another group is what defines a class. The appropriation of the surplus labour of direct producers by the ruling class is as much true of a feudal organization of production as it is of a capitalist mode of production. What distinguishes the two is the form in which this surplus labour is appropriated by the ruling classes, not the fact of surplus extraction per se. It is only in the capitalist mode of production that the surplus labour of the direct producers, i.e., the workers, takes the form of surplus value and is mediated through the institution of wage-labour. While this makes the exploitation of workers less apparent under capitalism, it also distinguishes the capitalist mode of production from non-capitalist modes, where the appropriation of surplus labour is much more visible, direct and brutal. For instance, in the feudal organization of society in Medieval Europe, the surplus labour of the serf was immediately visible as the work he did on the lord’s land; the surplus labour took the form of the product of the serf’s labour. The visibility of exploitation, understood as the appropriation of unpaid labour time of the direct producers, is lost under capitalist relations of production; it is obscured by the institution of wage-labour.
The study attempts to identify the evolution of the modes of appropriation of surplus labour in India indirectly by studying the evolution of key structures of the Indian economy at the aggregate level. The underlying assumption of the whole study is that the evolution of the aggregate economic structures, like ownership patterns in the agrarian economy, the evolution of labour forms like tenancy, wage-labour, bonded labour, the size-distribution of firms in the informal sector, the patterns of employment and migration, the importance of merchant and finance capital, etc., can provide useful and reliable information about the mode of surplus extraction. While it is possible to form a picture of the aggregate evolution of the Indian economy using data available from sources like the NSSO, the Agricultural Census, the Census of India – and that is precisely what we do in this study – we are fully aware of the limitations of such aggregate accounts. Many micro-level variations are lost in the aggregate story and so, wherever possible, the aggregate picture is complemented with case studies.
The study is broadly divided into two sections, one dealing with the agrarian economy and the other with what has come to be called the “informal” industrial sector. This twin focus is motivated by several considerations. First, the agrarian economy accounts for the largest section of the country’s workforce and population; this makes it a natural focus of any study which attempts to understand the evolution of the Indian economy and society at the aggregate level. Second, while the non-agrarian economy consists of the industrial and the services sector, the majority of the workforce in these two sectors is, again, found in what has been called the “informal” sector; that is why this becomes one of the foci of this study. Third, to the extent that an understanding of the relations of production (and forms of surplus extraction) is at issue, the “formal” industrial and services sector are probably beyond the domain of any debate; most serious scholars and activists would agree that the “formal” sector is characterized by capitalist relations of production. Since, what seems to be at issue is the “correct” characterization of the relations of production and forms of surplus extraction in the agrarian economy and the non-agricultural “informal” sector, this study focuses on precisely these two as an intervention in the broader debate about the characterization of Indian society.
Here we present a summary account of our findings, first for the agricultural sector and then for the “informal” industrial sector and end by raising some political and philosophical issues for discussion; for more empirical details and sources of the data readers are requested to look at the full article (which is posted here as a pdf).
AGRICULTURE: TRENDS AND SUMMARY
Our analysis of aggregate level data has revealed the following significant trends in the agrarian economy of India:
1.The share of GDP contributed by agriculture has steadily declined over the last five decades; this decline has not been matched by a decline in the share of the workforce engaged in agriculture. The result of these two trends has been a declining share of per capita value added from the agricultural sector. This has essentially consigned a large section of the Indian working population to very low productivity (and low income) work.
2.The average size of agricultural holdings, both ownership and operational, has seen a steady decline over the last five decades, with the average ownership holding in 2002-03 being 0.73 hectares.
3.The ownership of land remains as skewed as it was five decades ago; several measures capture this skewed pattern of ownership in the agrarian economy. For instance, the Gini coefficient of landholding ownership concentration has remained practically unchanged between 1960-61 and 2002-03. In fact it has marginally increased between 1991-92 and 2002-03.
4. While the aggregate distribution of land ownership remains as skewed as before, interesting and important patterns are visible within this unchanging aggregate picture. The share of land owned by large (10 ha or more) and medium (4 ha to 10 ha) landholding families has steadily declined over the last few decades from around 60% to 34%; the share owned by small (1 ha to 2 ha) and marginal (less than 1 ha) landholding families has increased from around 21% to 43%, while the share of semi-medium (2 ha to 4 ha) families has remained unchanged at around 20%.
5.Parallel to this decline in the share of land held by large landholding families is their decline as a share of rural households; on the other hand, there is a large increase in the share of small and marginal landholding families among rural households. In 2002-03, 80% of rural households were marginal landholding families; the corresponding figure was 66% in 1960-61. Both these trends seem to indicate the declining economic, social and political power of the landowning class in India.
6.The geographical (inter-state) variation of landholding ownership pattern allows us to divide the Indian states into two groups: large landholding states, and small landholding states. In the “large” landholding states, a substantial share of total area is still owned by relatively large landholding families; in the “small” landholding states, the share of land held by large or medium landholding families is very small. The former group consists of: Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan; the second group consists of: Assam, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, J&K, Kerala, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal.
7.Going hand-in-hand with the decline in the share of land owned by large landowning families, is the steady decline of tenant cultivation and its gradual replacement by self cultivation in Indian agriculture. The share of operational holdings using tenant cultivation declined from about 24% in 1960-61 to about 10% in 2002-03. There are large geographical variations in the extent of tenancy, with the largest share of leased-in land as a share of total operated area occurring in Punjab and Haryana, two prominent examples of what we have called large landholding states; Orissa has high prevalence of tenancy and is an example of what we have called small landholding states. The proportion of area owned and the proportion of area operated by the different size-classes are almost equal; hence, there is no evidence of reverse tenancy on any substantial scale at the aggregate level, though this might hide reverse tenancy at state or regional level.
8.In most places where tenancy exists, the largest form of the tenancy contract is still sharecropping. In 2002-03, share cropping accounted for about 40% of the land under tenancy; this has more or less stayed constant over the decades. An important exception is Punjab and Haryana, the two states which have the largest share of leased-in land, where the predominant form of the tenancy contract is for fixed monetary payment.
9.Effective landlessness is large and has steadily increased over the past few decades. The share of effectively landless households in total rural households has increased from about 44% in 1960-61 to 60% in 2002-03.
10.Small holding agricultural production has increasingly become economically unviable over the years. In 2003, the average income from cultivation was insufficient to cover even the very low level of consumption expenditures of the majority of rural households. This is one of the primary causes behind the recent increase in rural indebtedness. This increasing difficulty of sustaining incomes through cultivation was probably what led close to 40% of farmers in 2005 to suggest, in the course of a NSSO Survey, that given a chance, they would opt out of agriculture. Changes in the agrarian structure of India seem to have already brought the question of collectivization on the historical agenda. We return to this point in the conclusion.
11. Disaggregating total incomes of rural households engaged in agriculture show that wage income has become the main source of income for a large majority of the population. For about 60% of the rural households in 2003, the major share of income came from wage work, supplemented by income coming from petty commodity production, both in the agricultural and non-agricultural sector. Another 20% of rural households drew equal shares of their total income from wage work and cultivation, both at about 40%.
12.Prevalence of informal sources of credit through moneylenders had seen a sharp decline over the 1960s and 1970s, but the decline seems to have been halted since the early 1980s. The moneylender has made a comeback in rural India, facilitated by a steady retreat of the institutions of formal credit.
13.There was significant capital accumulation in the agricultural sector during the 1970s and 1980s; this has drastically fallen during the 1980s and has picked up a little during the 1990s. The fall in the growth rate of capital formation has been largely driven by the fall in public sector investments in the agrarian economy.
Putting all these trends together, one is led to the following tentative conclusions (more in the nature of a working hypothesis): over the past few decades, the relations of production in the Indian agrarian economy have slowly evolved from what could be characterized as “semi-feudal” towards what can tentatively be termed “capitalist”; this conclusion emerges from the fact that the predominant mode of surplus extraction seems to be working through the institution of wage-labour, the defining feature of capitalism. Articulated to the global capitalist-imperialist system, the development of capitalism in the periphery has of course not led to the growth of income and living standards of the vast majority of the population. On the contrary, the agrarian economy has continued to stagnate and the majority of the rural population has been consigned to a life of poverty and misery.
Aggregate level data suggests that the two main forms through which the surplus product of direct producers is extracted are (a) surplus value through the institution of wage-labour (which rests on equal exchange), and (b) surplus value through unequal exchange (which mainly affects petty producers) where input prices are inflated and output prices deflated for the direct producers due to the presence of monopoly, monopsony and interlinking of markets; semi-feudal forms of surplus product extraction, through the institution of tenant cultivation and share cropping, has declined over time. Merchant and usurious capital continues to maintain a substantial presence in the life of the rural populace, both of which manage to appropriate a part of the surplus value created through wage-labour, apart from directly extracting surplus value from petty producers through unequal exchange.
The process of class differentiation has been considerably slowed down and complicated due to the steady incorporation of the Indian economy into the global capitalist system, which has supported and even encouraged the growth of a large “informal” production sector. This informal production sector can be best understood as being involved in petty commodity production, both of agricultural and nonagricultural commodities. Petty commodity production refers to the organization of production where the producer owns the means of production and primarily uses family and other forms of non-wage labour in the production process. Petty commodity production is exploited mainly by merchant and usurious capital where the main form of surplus extraction is through the mechanism of unequal exchange and not through the institution of wage-labour; unequal exchange is often facilitated and maintained through interlinked product, labour and credit markets. The coexistence of both wage-labour and petty commodity production, whereby landless labourers, marginal farmers and small farmers participate in both, in one as free labour and in the other as owner-producer, has impeded the development of proletarian class consciousness and complicated the task of revolutionary politics. It is to a detailed study of petty commodity production in the non-agricultural sector that we now turn.
INFORMAL INDUSTRY: TRENDS AND SUMMARY
In the second part of this study we have attempted to take a broad look at the organization of informal industry in India. In particular we have focused on the evolution of firm size, the types of production relations and the modes of surplus extraction prevailing in informal industry. The following conclusions can be drawn:
1. The industrial sector as a whole (formal and informal) has not expanded greatly in terms of employment in the past three decades and today stands at around 18% (compared to China’s 24%) of total employment in the Indian economy.
2. The informal sector still accounts for around 75% of industrial employment in India. The employment share of the formal sector in general and large-scale industry in particular has been stagnant for the past three decades.
3. Informal industry produces a wide variety of commodities including food products, textiles, wood and metal products and provides services to several types of heavier and more capital-intensive industry.
4. The number of informal firms and workers has been more of less stationary since the 1980s and the relative share of petty-proprietorships, marginal and small capitalist firms is also largely unaltered.
5. As expected most informal firms do not own substantial amounts of capital equipment. The land or building on which the firm is situated accounts for 60-80% of asset value for informal firms.
6. Even though GVA for the formal sector far outstrips GVA in the informal sector, value added in informal industry has increased significantly in the last decade. Since the number of workers has remained more or less the same, this suggests that labor productivity has been rising in this sector.
7. The relations of production in informal industry are neither purely independent producer (characterized by producer’s ownership of labor and capital) nor only industrial capitalist (characterized by a proletarian workforce and a real subsumption of labor to capital). Rather a spectrum of putting-out relations based on formal subsumption of labor and a reliance on extraction of absolute rather than relative surplus value is observed.
8. In addition to putting-out arrangements, nominally self-employed or independent producers are often locked into a relation of dependency vis-à-vis merchant and finance capital. This situation is closely analogous to the position of the peasant in the countryside with respect to intermediaries.
9. Piece-wages, unequal exchange, bonded labor, contingent and casual labor, and gender and caste oppression all conspire to increase the producer’s exploitation largely via extraction of absolute surplus value.
10. In the face of the failure of modern industry to expand satisfactorily, informal industry has acted as the “employer of last resort” for surplus labor in the agricultural sector. Relations of dependency and lack of resources as well as incentives for technical change keep informal workers trapped in low productivity, low wage work. Surplus labor, low wages and intense (self) exploitation in turn create disincentives for technical change.
CONCLUSION
By way of conclusion, we would like to raise some political and philosophical issues and questions for further discussion without in any way claiming to have arrived at any conclusive answers. Though both the authors largely agree to the aggregate trends presented above, we derive different political and social implications from these trends. This derives partly from different political and philosophical perspectives that both of us see ourselves closest to. Rather than paper over our differences, we therefore, present our alternative viewpoints, which might even be contradictory, for further debate and discussion.
The first issue that we would like to put forward for discussion is the continued centrality of the agrarian question to any project for revolutionizing Indian society. This follows simply from the fact that the majority of the working people in India are related, directly or indirectly, with the agricultural sector; this is a direct result of the failure of the structural transformation of the Indian economy. Any attempt, therefore, at radical reconstruction of Indian society will have to deal with the agrarian question effectively. Dealing with the agrarian question will mean, among other things, rapidly increasing the productivity of agricultural activity, the surest way to increase the income of the vast masses of the working people involved in agriculture and thereby create a home market for domestic industry.
But here we come up with some difficult questions that need to be addressed. Traditionally, the Marxist tradition has seen redistributive land reforms as essential to the project of dealing with the agrarian question. The reasons have primarily been political, though some economic arguments have also been developed.2 Politically, land reforms have been seen as a way to decisively break the power of the parasitic class of feudal and semi-feudal landlords; economically, it has been understood as creating conditions for the development of the productive forces in rural society, increasing the productivity of labour, creating a surplus for supporting industrialization and providing a market for domestic industry.
Using Lenin’s distinction between the Prussian and the American paths for bourgeois development in the rural economy lends credence to the call for redistributive land reforms. Discussing the “two forms” of bourgeois development out of the feudal and semi-feudal order characterized by serfdom, he says:
The survivals of serfdom may fall away either as a result of the transformation of landlord economy or as a result of the abolition of the landlord latifundia, i. e., either by reform or by revolution. Bourgeois development may proceed by having big landlord economies at the head, which will gradually become more and more bourgeois and gradually substitute bourgeois for feudal methods of exploitation. It may also proceed by having small peasant economies at the head, which in a revolutionary way, will remove the “excrescence” of the feudal latifundia from the social organism and then freely develop without them along the path of capitalist economy.
Those two paths of objectively possible bourgeois development we would call the Prussian path and the American path, respectively. In the first case feudal landlord economy slowly evolves into bourgeois, Junker landlord economy, which condemns the peasants to decades of most harrowing expropriation and bondage, while at the same time a small minority of Grossbauern (“big peasants”) arises. In the second case there is no landlord economy, or else it is broken up by revolution, which confiscates and splits up the feudal estates. In that case the peasant predominates, becomes the sole agent of agriculture, and evolves into a capitalist farmer. In the first case the main content of the evolution is transformation of feudal bondage into servitude and capitalist exploitation on the land of the feudal landlords—Junkers. In the second case the main background is transformation of the patriarchal peasant into a bourgeois farmer. (Lenin, 1907).
The three main communist streams in India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation and the Communist Party of India (Maoist) more or less accept this distinction, the first two explicitly and the last one implicitly.3 Hence, for all the three streams the main task (or axis) of the current stage of the Peoples (or New) Democratic Revolution is the agrarian revolution, with redistributive land reforms being one of its main tasks.
While it is true that India, because it did not witness any serious efforts at land reforms on a national scale, developed along the landlord path out of semi-feudalism, there are some important differences that need to be considered. One pole of landlord capitalism, viz., landlessness has been growing over the years; the other pole of landlord capitalism, viz., the continued dominance of a few “big peasants” seems to be at variance with the evidence. Aggregate level data about India that we have seen in the course of this study seems to throw up an unmistakable trend of the declining power of landlords (feudal or otherwise), not by any revolutionary means but just by the sheer pressure of demographic developments and economic stagnation. The total land owned by the large landholding families, the “big peasants” that Lenin refers to, have halved over the last five decades and today they own only about 12 percent of the total land. On the other hand, the land owned by medium-to-small landholding families has increased to over 65 percent. Does this, along with other evidence on the decline of tenancy and the increase of wage-labour, not indicate that the rural economy in India is inexorably being pushed in the direction of peasant capitalism? How would this important trend of the increasing dominance of peasant capitalism, and a gradual whittling down of landlord capitalism, change the course of the agrarian revolution? If landlords, as a class, are dwindling in economic and social power, is a programme aimed at breaking their political power still relevant? Is the contradiction between feudalism and the broad masses of the people still the principal contradiction in India today?
Another issue that will need to be addressed in the context of the slogan for redistributive land reforms is to see whether the resulting farms will be viable in any meaningful economic sense. Let us recall that the average size of ownership holding in India in 2003 was 0.81 hectares; so, the most equitable redistribution will result in the average holding of this size. If instead land is only taken from those owning more than 10 acres and all of it distributed among those currently owning less than 1 acre, then the average size of holding for those receiving redistributed land will roughly become 1.25 acres.
If we juxtapose this with the cost of cultivation data, we can easily see that agricultural units of approximately such sizes will not be economically viable in the sense of being able to generate any surplus product after sustaining a decent level of consumption of the producers. It is extremely doubtful whether these small farms can generate any economic surplus even after the onerous relations of unequal exchange have been removed from the picture. Can they, therefore, help in the industrialization effort by generating surplus or will they instead require a net resource flow in their direction with subsidized credit, power, inputs, etc. to continuously keep them viable? This question is extremely important as was shown in the immediate aftermath of the October revolution in Russia when the revolutionary regime was put in serious jeopardy by a severe food shortage.
The growth of capitalist relations, the continued fragmentation of the land, the decline in tenancy, the unviability of small-scale production and other related factors seem to suggest that a higher form of agrarian development, i.e., collective forms of agricultural production, is gradually being pushed on to the historical agenda of the revolutionary movements in India. Collective, cooperative and socialist forms of large-scale agriculture probably need to be seriously considered as an option emerging out of the very evolution of the material conditions of the vast masses of the working people. The agenda of redistributive land reforms creating bourgeois property in rural areas and facilitating capitalist development needs to be seriously rethought, not because of some ideological reasons but because the development of the agrarian structure seems to demand such a revaluation.
The second large issue raised by our study concerns the mode of industrialization of the Indian economy. It is relatively uncontroversial that a shift of the agricultural population into the secondary and tertiary sectors will be required in order to raise real incomes of the vast majority. How this transformation is to be achieved is the question. The structural transformation required to relieve above-mentioned pressures on agriculture cannot be left to the anarchy of the global capitalist market. The “market-friendly” post-1991 period has been witness to a type of growth that has resulted in rising inequality and increasing number of low-wage, contingent and informal jobs. However the contradictions and problems of the pre-Reform, “planning period” also need to be taken seriously. There is an urgent need to break out of certain simple binaries and equations which have been imposed upon us. The first binary is that between State-managed capitalism and market-oriented capitalism. India’s experience shows that the vast majority of the working population has suffered greatly in both regimes. In our struggle against a particularly predatory type of neoliberal capitalism (whose days may in any case be numbered given the global crisis), we must not find ourselves unwittingly arguing for a return to the bureaucratic and corrupt State. Rather the spectacular failure of the neoliberal model can be an opportunity to demand greater decentralization and more autonomous development. The various people’s movements have been articulating precisely such a model of development.
The second simple equation is between rural areas and agriculture on the one hand, and cities and industry on the other hand. The social and ecological contradictions of the large-scale, capital intensive model of industrialization must be taken seriously. Nowhere has this model produced high levels of employment in an ecologically sustainable fashion while giving producers a say in the running of the workplace. It is becoming increasingly clear that the economic viability of such industrialization is obtained only by cost externalization. The Indian experience points to the necessity for developing dispersed, low capital-intensity, sustainable models of industry that nevertheless raise real incomes of the majority (see Datye 1997 for one such model). This is not a utopian pipe-dream but rather a historical necessity if “development” is not to remain an unfulfilled promise for the majority of Indians.
None of the above can be taken only as a demand for better or more enlightened development policy. Rather it articulates what has already been emerging from social and political movements and in turn seeks to ground the political demands in an empirical and theoretical context. There is a need to extend revolutionary people’s movements rooted in peasant agriculture and national resource struggles into the rural, semi-urban and urban industrial milieu. The urgent question here is how can the dispersed industrial working class be effectively politically organized at a national level? This working class does not always resemble the “classical” doubly-free, urban industrial proletariat. Yet, our attempt here has show that it remains exploited nonetheless and can and should form an important component of left revolutionary politics. Is an artisan-peasant alliance a possibility for the near future?
There is a difference of opinion between the two of us on the question of the model of industrialization that might fruitfully accompany efforts at a radical restructuring of Indian society. While one of us believes, as has been stated in the above paragraphs, that a dispersed, low capital-intensity, sustainable model of industrialization emerges from the Indian experience, the other believes that the scale and geographic dispersal of industrialization per se does not lead to its being more democratic or ecologically sustainable. What is rather more important is the institutional setting within which the industrialization effort is embedded. A small-scale industrialization effort in the context of local level inequalities of class, caste and gender can reinforce those inequalities and nullify all attempts at democratic control of the production process; on the other hand, a large-scale, high capital intensity and centralized industrialization effort within a socialist context might be amenable to democratic control if the institutions of workers’ control are in place. Sustainability, again, seems to have more to do with proper cost-benefit analysis rather than the scale of production as such. In a socialist context, where the surplus product of society is democratically controlled, the pace and direction of technical change will be determined in a rational and scientific manner and not left to the anarchy of capitalist production and the imperatives of profit maximization. In such a setting, internalizing the environmental costs of production would flow naturally from the imperatives of all round social development.
Despite the differing views advanced above, we hope the this study and the accompanying reflections and speculations will serve to fuel discussion and debate among those working for a radical restructuring of Indian society along socialist principles.
(We would like to thanks Debarshi Das and Mohan Rao for helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper.)
The current crisis of Capital and the current response
In the current juncture, the crisis of capitalism, as in the repeated crises of capital and overproduction and speculation predicted by Marx, capitalists have a big problem. Their profits, the value of the shares and part control of companies by Chief Executive Officers and other capitalist executives (late twentieth century capitalists), are plummeting. The rate of profit is falling, has fallen.
The political response by parties funded by Capital, such as the Democrats and Republicans in the USA, and Labour, Liberal and Conservative in the UK is not to blame the capitalist system, not even to blame the neoliberal form of capitalism (new brutalist public managerialism/ management methods, privatisation, businessification of education, for example, increasing gaps between rich and poor, between schools in well-off areas and schools in poor areas). They have criticised only two aspects of neoliberalism: what they now (and only now!) see as the over-extent of deregulation, and the (obscene) levels of pay and reward taken by ‘the big bankers’, by a few Chief Executive Officers (CEOs).
Not an end to Capitalism or even to Neoliberal Capitalism
Talk of an end to neoliberalism is premature, so is talk of an end to capitalism. Criticism in the mainstream capitalist media and mainstream capitalist political parties is only of the excesses of Capitalism, indeed, only the excesses of that form of capitalism- neoliberal capitalism- that has been dominant since the 1970s, the Thatcher-Reagan years- dominant in countries across the globe, and within the international capitalist organisations such as the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the World Trade Organisation.
Premature, too, is talk of a return to a new Keynesianism, a new era of public sector public works, together with (in revulsion at neoliberalism’s- in fact- capitalism’s- excesses) a new Puritanism in private affairs/ private industry.
The current intervention by governments across the globe to ’save banks’ can be seen as ’socialism for the rich’, a spreading of the pain and costs amongst all citizens/ taxpayers to bail out the banks and bankers. Side by side with this bailing out of the banks (while retaining them as private- not nationalised institutions!) is the privatisation, and individualisation of pain- the pain that will be felt in wallets and homes and workplaces throughout the capitalist countries, both rich and poor. Already (November 2008) we see in Britain the Conservative Party changing its previous policy of matching Labour’s spending plans for 2010 onwards into a rightward slide- saying that public services will have to suffer, to pay for the cost of the crisis. Capitalist governments throughout the world will, unless successfully contested by class war and action from below, make the workers and their/ our public services, pay for the crisis. So that, once again, the bankers can make their billions, extracted from the surplus value of the labour power of workers.
It is true that finance institutions need government intervention, in order to keep funding loans and mortgages, to prevent banks and finance capital repossessing people’s homes. But under what conditions?
Marxists and left socialists need to lead and support calls and mobilisations for the nationalisation of the banks. In Britain, for example, people such as John McDonnell, the leader of the ‘left’ Labour MPs in Britain, and the LRC (Labour Representation Committee) and Marxist groups such as the Socialist Party and the International Socialist Group and the Socialist Workers Party call for banks to be taken into public ownership (with the SP calling for ‘compensation only on the basis of proven need’), in other words for the nationalisation of finance to be complete and long-term.
But Capital and the parties it funds will, seek to ensure that Capital is resurgent, and that after what they see as this temporary ‘blip’ in capitalist profitability, it will once again confidently bestride the world, though with less of an obvious smirk on its face, and with less obvious flashing of riches. At least for the time being.
In times such as these, of economic crisis and of the inevitable retrenchment, it will be the poor that pays for the crisis, in fact, not just the poor, but the middle and lower strata of the working class.
Controlling the Workers
And who better to ‘control’ the workers, the workforce, to sell a deal – cuts in the actual wage (relative to inflation) and the social wage (cuts in the real value of benefits and of public welfare and social services)- but the former workers’ parties such as the Labour Party, or, in the USA, the party with (as with labour in Britain) links to the trade union movement- the Democrats. So US Capital swung massively behind Obama in the US Presidential election, and it is likely that increasing sections of British Capital will swing behind Gordon Brown and what is still regarded by many as a workers’ party, or at least, the more social democratic of the major parties on offer. Better to control the workers when the cuts do come. And to return to a slightly less flashy form of capitalism- more regulated, but still the privatising neoliberal managerialising, commodifying, neo-colonial and imperialistic capitalism.
Resistance
This is, as ever, subject to resistance and the balance of class forces (itself related to developing levels of class consciousness, political consciousness and political organisation and leadership). Resistance is possible, and will, inevitably grow. Demonstrations, strikes, anger, outrage at cuts, will increase, perhaps dramatically, in the coming period. To repeat, to be successful instead of inchoate, such anger and political activism needs to be focussed, and organised. In such circumstances, the forces of the Marxist Left in countries across the globe, need to put aside decades old enmities, doctrinal, organisation and strategic disputes. In Britain, for example, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers party, Respect, the Alliance for Workers Liberty, the Communist Party of Britain, other groups on the Marxist Left, together with socialists within the Labour Party, need to rapidly form a coherent organisation/ alliance and expose the current crisis as a crisis not just of neoliberalism, but of Capitalism itself. And to pose Socialist alternatives. Here, the new anti-capitalist party in France (under the leadership of Olivier Besancenot), coalescing formerly rival groups and individuals, is an outstanding example of a successful regrouping/ regroupement of the Marxist Left. And in Britain, the Convention of the Left could play a coalescing role?
Of course, regroupment by itself just organises current activists and supporters. Regroupment needs to be followed by, accompanied now! by recruitment. At this particular moment in the crisis of capital accumulation and the actual and potential for loosening the chains of ideology/ false consciousness promulgated by knowledge workers in the (witting or unwitting) service of Capital.
Implications for Education Policy of the Current Crisis
Within England there may well be some minor changes following from disenchantment with neoliberalism. Such changes, the changes in recent years promoting more creativity in the curriculum, reducing the burden of tests, have been argued for by unions and by the Socialist Teachers Association (STA) for years.
But changes to restore and go beyond a more democratically accountable, less brutalist, less divisive, less test-driven, less punitive education system, are not yet on the cards. With campaigns and mass pressures they could become so.
But there is nothing inevitable about neoliberal education transmogrifying any time soon into liberal child friendly and/ or socialist education for equality. These need to be fought for, and will need to be part of a wider transformation of social and economic relations in society.
Which is why we can foresee an intensification of right-wing attacks on radical and socialist educators, on critical pedagogues, throughout the capitalist world.
The culture wars, between the ideologies/ belief systems of Marxism and Socialism on the one hand, and the various forms of pro-capitalist ideology: social democratic, liberal –progressive, neoconservative, neoliberal and racist/ Fascist ideologies on the other, will intensify.
Interest in Marxism is growing. More are seeing through the Emperors’ clothes of pro-capitalist politicians, sand their sleight of hand support for Finance Capitalism and Capitalist exploitation of the labour power of workers.
Hence, in these current times, Marxist and radical educators are dangerous. Intimidation, dismissals, public denunciations (there are many cases globally, most recently in Australia and the USA) will increase.
It is a time for civic courage, for hope, for Marxist analysis, for solidarity, for organisation. A united Left could and should display all five.
Dave Hill is Professor of education policy, University of Northampton, United Kingdom.
A Review of Labour Vulnerability and Debt Bondage in Contemporary India, CEC, March 2008, xii+92, Price – Rs 200.
The persistence of “debt bondage” in India has long mesmerised the progressive intellectuals and activists, a vast majority of whom still consider its existence as a reminder of the amphibian (semi-feudal, semi-capitalist) character of India’s political economy and its underdevelopment – overloaded with pre-capitalist “vestiges”. The booklet under review drastically differs from such an understanding of bondage. It does not view it as “a unique system”, rather as a form of employment relationship institutionalising labour vulnerability through debt. “Bonded labour is primarily a social relationship and all those labour relations where vulnerability of the workers is institutionalised through debt could be described as bondage”(6). Further, bondage is “a flexible and adaptive system of labour exploitation”(8).
With the development of capitalist relations in India, bondage has increasingly lost its earlier permanent and generational nature, and has become more and more temporary, seasonal and individualised. The public policy and legal-state machinery that are in place to identify and ‘eradicate’ bondage are unable to record and influence its reproduction in the era of globalisation. Informalisation – contractualisation and casualisation – of the work process that characterises the neoliberal regime of accumulation has tremendously increased labour vulnerability leading to a system of “neo-bondage”, as Jan Breman calls it. Debt and bondage are most rampantly used as mechanisms to mobilise cheap labour from hinterlands and ensure migration (seasonal or long-term) for labour supply in the industries in which India has a comparative advantage. In fact, “with respect to bonded labourers, debt is always a precondition for entering the labour market and in establishing an employer-employee relationship” (80-81).
This report based on extensive studies throughout India maps the institutionalisation of labour vulnerabilities through various forms of debt bondage in contemporary India. With the help of many case studies, it shows how debt posits an element of liability on the part of the worker in the employment relationship, thus reinforcing and consensualising the subjugation of labour under circumstances and conditions on which the worker has a lesser control than otherwise. Advance or debt shapes “the situation of being employed”. It reconfigures an employment relationship as that between the debtor and the creditor, thus reducing the “agency of labour” and alienating the rights and entitlements of workers that characterise the ideal contractual relationship. However, the liabilities in the relationship or general costs of labour are accumulated and bestowed on the worker. The report understands that the role of debt in bondage “is not as an element of an agreement for which there are separate rules and practices of enforcement, but rather… to construct how the claims of workers will be interpreted and treated” (20).
The third chapter of the report assesses the interventions of the state and other agencies to eradicate bondage and rehabilitate bonded labour. It details the provisions of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976 and the subsequent judicial, legislative and executive activism. It enumerates the discrepancies in its implementation. The chapter also examines the intervention of NGOs. A significant conclusion in this regard is that it was the mobilisational and organisational efforts that were most effective in bonded labour eradication.
The report establishes that bonded labour too has contributed in “India shining” and its globalising aspirations. In fact, bonded labour is not just an input in commodity production; rather, workers in the relationship (conditioned by advances or debt) are essentially sellers of their labour power. “They are controlled by the employers in lieu of an advance or delayed payment or non-payment of minimum wages”.(82) Wages in such conditions are squeezed not only through depressed, delayed and deducted payments, but also via uncontrollable interest rates.
It is important to understand Marx’s conception of “wage slavery” here. The usage of this phrase was not at all allegorical or rhetorical, as many tend to believe. It conceptualised the unfreedom or coercion inherent in the dual freedom of labour (from physical compulsion and from the means of production). On one hand, this dual freedom creates an ambience that compels a labourer to sell his/her labour power. On the other hand, once labour power is sold for a period, the labourer has no control over its expenditure for that duration. It should be remembered though the custom is to pay the wages after labour-power is exercised, wages are, in fact, already advanced prior to the labour process not only for the purpose of records, but also as capital required for production – i.e., it constitutes variable capital that is required to buy labour-power and put it to work. In the circuit of capital given below, Money (M) is advanced to buy Means of Production (MP) and Labour Power (LP) before Production (P) can take place.
In fact, “whether money serves as a means of purchase or a means of payment, this does not alter the nature of the exchange of commodities”.(Karl Marx, Capital, Penguin, pp. 279) As “a means of purchase” money is advanced to the sellers of labour power prior to production, while as “a means of payment”, it remains as the worker’s “credit to the capitalist” until production is completed to be paid as wages afterwards. Functionally it hardly makes any difference – “this does not alter the nature of the exchange of commodities”. And both institutionalise labour vulnerabilities in their own way – advance (partial or whole) can easily be transformed into debt, creating liabilities that shape bondage, while wages can be delayed or even lost (when the capitalist goes bankrupt). In fact, the delay in receiving wages is a significant reason for indebtedness among workers. If in Marx’s England debt played a part in tying the worker more to a shop as a consumer, or to sustain the “truck system”, it can instigate other systems, too, to institute labour vulnerabilities. Ultimately the purpose is to increase these vulnerabilities and thus, reproduce the hegemony of capital over labour. The report remarkably succeeds in showing how this is done in various parts of India through debt bondage.
(This review was originally written for Labour File – A bimonthly journal of labour and economic affairs published from New Delhi)
Appendix
A. The process of proletarianisation to which the majority is subjugated, not the number of ‘ideal’ proletarians or wageworkers, defines capitalism. The actualisation of this process – and thus the degrees of proletarianisation or the “dual freedom of labour” differs according to the concrete contexts defined by the needs of capital and class struggle. More technically, this process is a long thread (not necessarily historical) between the formal subsumption to the actual subsumption of labour by capital – its two ends. At various junctures archaic unfreedom, like slavery, which generally characterised pre-capitalism is formally adopted (more aptly, exapted as explained in B) and transformed according to the conjunctural needs of capitalist accumulation. If we don’t recognise this processual aspect of capitalism, we will be lost in the miasma of overproduced forms and appearances in capitalism.
B. Stephen Jay Gould’s conception of exaptation, I believe, is very useful in understanding the dialectical internalisation of “vestiges” by new stages in evolution – both biological and social. Gould and Elisabeth S. Vrba in their 1982 paper define exaptation as (i) “a character, previously shaped by natural selection for a particular function (an adaptation), is coopted for a new use”; and, (ii) “a character whose origin cannot be ascribed to the direct action of natural selection (a nonaptation), is coopted for a current use”. This concept allows us to comprehend the reproduction of “vestiges” as a process internal to the new stage in development, not as something hindering the ‘complete’ realisation of the new stage.
C. The “purist” idea that “vestiges” obstruct (not shape or contextualise) capitalist development has for a long time informed the theory and practice of Marxism in the so-called third world countries – engaging the revolutionaries in the fruitless exercise of fighting the “vestiges” before taking on the basic system, thus investing their revolutionary vigour in the reformist project of the capitalist development. It is interesting to note that this is not only true about the “Leninists” and “Maoists”, as some “anti-Leninists” allege. Many anti-Leninists and anti-Maoists present more vehement denial of the feasibility of any socialist project in “backward” countries. Their conceptualistion of revolution not only goes against the thesis of “revolution in permanence” – “the downfall of all the privileged classes, and the subjection of these classes to the dictatorship of the proletariat by maintaining the revolution in permanence until the realisation of Communism, which is the final form of organisation of human society” – but is also an unconscious reinforcement of the notion of “socialism in one country”, which they profess to hate.
The long term story, as I have already indicated, is a story about the rise and (possible) fall of neoliberalism. The Golden Age of Capitalism – the two and a half decades after the second World War – drew to a close by the late 1960s and global capitalism entered a period of structural crisis. The process of general capital accumulation is largely driven by current and expected trends of profitability of capital (measured by the rate of profit). When the rate of profit declines the process of capital accumulation slows down, heralding a period of crisis of capitalism. The rate of profit had peaked in the early-to-mid 1960s in both Europe and the USA; thereafter, the rate of profit continued to decline for the next decade and a half falling from a high of about 20 percent to a low of around 10 percent.
Structural Crisis of Capitalism
Why did the rate of profit fall during this period? The falling profit rate goes to the heart of capitalism and shows up deep contradictions in the process of economic growth and technical change that accompanies capitalist development. The technological dynamism of capitalism is driven by competition between capitals to increase profits by reducing the cost of production. When the share of wages in national income is high, there is a strong incentive for capitalists to reduce the amount of labour required for production. The Golden Age of Capitalism, being a period of regulated and welfare capitalism, had ensured high and rising real wages and therefore maintained a high and relatively constant share of wages in national income. That provided the incentive for adopting labour saving technical change, i.e., adopting new techniques of production that required less and less labour per unit of output. Labour saving technical change increased the productivity of labour.
But the increasing productivity of labour came at a cost: falling productivity of capital or the output-capital ratio (the ratio of output to capital). Labour saving technical change, which increased labour productivity, was only achieved by replacing labour with capital, i.e., more and more labour was replaced by more and more machines in the process of production. This is one of the characteristic features that we often observe with capitalist development: mechanization and the increasing capital intensity of production. The use of more and more machines that increased labour productivity meant that every unit of output now required less labour but more capital; thus labour productivity increased but capital productivity fell.
This is the pattern of technical change, whereby labour productivity increases but capital productivity falls, that accompanies capitalist development during significant periods of time. This is also the way Marx had described the pattern of technical change under capitalism in his discussion of the process of general capital accumulation in Volume 1 of Capital. That is why economists Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy has called this pattern “trajectories a la Marx”, while Duncan Foley and Thomas Michl has called it Marx-biased technical change. But what has this pattern of technical change got to do with the falling rate of profit?
The rate of profit is defined as the ratio of profits to the total stock of capital and can be decomposed as follows:
rate of profit = (profit/capital) = (profit/output)*(output/capital)
Thus we see that the rate of profit is the product of two crucial ratios: (1) the share of profits in output, and (2) the productivity of capital. The share of profits in output, though high, had remained relatively stable through the Golden Age of Capitalism; this is a typical pattern observed under capitalism (other than for the neoliberal period). The productivity of capital, on the other hand, fell because of Marx-biased technical change leading to a sharp fall in the rate of profit, and ushering in a period of crisis for capitalism. The sharp decline in the rate of profit meant a decline in the revenues accruing to all sectors of the capitalist class, especially the top fraction. The neoliberal counterrevolution, the sharp turn in economic and social policy around the mid-1970s, was the response of the upper fraction of the capitalist class to their declining income and power (a more detailed development of this argument can be found in Dumenil and Levy, 2004).
Neoliberal Response as a Prelude to Crisis
The neoliberal turn largely managed to achieve what it had set out to. Profit rates started moving up and the revenue accruing to capital, especially the top fraction of capital associated with the financial sector, increased enormously. But it was a period of unmitigated disaster for the working class. Unemployment rates rose across the capitalist world, wages stopped growing (or slowed down considerably) in real terms, social welfare expenditures were gradually cut down, unions and other working class organizations were “busted”; in short, the social power and revenue accruing to the working class was severely restricted. It was a true counterrevolution which restored the power and privilege of the ruling class.
The two figures below demonstrate this in vivid terms. Between 1950 and 1973, real wages had increased at an annual compound rate of 2.61 percent, closely following the phenomenal growth of labour productivity which grew at an average annual compound rate of 2.70 percent. The next 25 years stand in stark contrast to this. Between 1974 and 1999, labour productivity grew at 1.62 percent per annum while real wages grew at only 0.92 percent per annum. Thus, even though labour productivity growth had slowed down significantly, it was still growing at close to twice rate at which real wages increased. This created a stupendous growth in profit incomes and created the source of finance that was to submerge the US working class in debt for the next four decades.
A crucial aspect of the neoliberal turn was the deregulation of sundry aspects of the economy, including, most importantly, the domain of operation of finance. The last great crisis of capital during the Great Depression had brought forth several important changes and new developments in the regulatory framework of capitalism. One by one, each of these laws relating to the operation of finance, both domestically and internationally, were whittled down or even outright overturned. Thus, the burgeoning profit income and the shredding of all regulation together created the supply of debt finance in the US economy. The demand for debt arose from a working class facing stagnant wage incomes but long used to growing consumption expenditures. The net result was the largest build-up of debt in the US economy since the Great Depression. During the beginning of the Great Depression total debt was about 300 percent of US GDP; in early 2008, total debt in the US economy was touching 350 percent of GDP. It was this huge debt build-up resulting from three decades of neoliberal economic policies that created a systemically fragile financial superstructure which imploded, leading to a credit freeze, when the housing bubble burst (I have borrowed parts of this argument from Wolf, 2008).
(Concluded.)
References:
Dumenil, G. and D. Levy. 2004. Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution. Harvard University Press.
Wolff. R. 2008. Capitalism Hits the Fan. Available here.
The medium term story of the evolving financial crisis begins at the end of the last century. With the bursting of the dot-com bubble at the end of the 1990s, possibilities of a long recession hovered on the horizon. The Federal Reserve, the Central Bank of the US, moved in with the tools of monetary policy to ease the slowdown. The target for the federal funds rate, the key short-term interest rate that the Fed monitors as part of it’s monetary policy tasks, was gradually lowered from over 6 percent per annum to a little below 2 percent within a span of about an year. Lowering interest rates to engineer a soft-landing for a slowing economy is a natural thing to do: reducing the cost of borrowing funds is a key way the Central Bank can affect the level of investment and consumption (especially of durable goods) expenditures and thereby boost the level of aggregate demand in a slowing capitalist economy. With finance in command, this normal and natural move had a perverse effect.
The effects of the falling federal funds rate gradually cascaded from the short-end to the longer end of the asset market, lowering interest rates on all kinds of contracts. One of the key long-term interest rates affected by this very sensible move of the Fed was the interest rate charged on various kinds of mortgage loans (loans to finance the purchase of homes). With mortgage interest rates falling, consumers not only started purchasing new homes with new mortgage loans but also refinancing their old mortgages. With the demand for mortgage loans increasing, and the increase sustained by a low-interest rate regime, house prices started picking up. Very soon, i.e., within a year or two, economists started noticing a bubble in house prices. There were several indicators of a house price bubble. For instance, the Case-Shiller house price index for 10 US cities – a commonly used price index for houses – increased rapidly since the early 2000s. Even more tellingly, the price-to-rental ratio of houses went through the roof. Between January 2000 and April 2006, the rental of an average house did not increase at all; during the same period, price of an average house increased by about 70 percent, sending the price-to-rental ratio on an upward spiral.
The fact that the price-to-rental ratio increased rapidly gave a clear indication that a house price bubble was building up. People were, in other words, purchasing houses not because of the service provided by a house but because of speculative motives. A rough proxy for the value attributed by consumers to the service provided by a house is the rental rate; since this was not increasing, it meant that people were not valuing the real service provided by the house. But prices of houses were shooting up giving an indication of an increasing demand for houses (relative to supply). Most of this demand was clearly arising from speculative motives; many of the house purchases were for the purpose of selling them off at a later date to reap capital gains (i.e., the profit derived from the difference between the selling and the buying price of the asset). Thus, the rise in prices was not driven by “fundamentals” (i.e., increase in the intrinsic value of the service provided by houses) but largely by speculative motives of capital gains; that is precisely what leads to an asset price bubble and that is what happened.
Sub-prime Mortgage Market
A run of a couple of quarters of rising house prices was very soon incorporated into the expectation formation mechanisms of financial markets. As has been observed over and over again in history, rising asset prices very soon creates irrational expectations that prices will keep rising, rising certainly in the foreseeable future if not forever. Such periods of rapidly rising expectations, feeding primarily on itself, have been labelled as “manias” by economists studying periods of asset price boom-and-bust. Prominent examples of such economists are Charles P. Kindleberger and Hyman P. Minsky, coming, as they are, from very different political traditions. In the context of the early twenty-first century US economy, the unprecedented house price bubble created grounds for the emergence of predatory lending and the sub-prime mortgage market. The sub-prime mortgage market was the market for mortgage loans to less-than-creditworthy borrowers at very high interest rates that often came with hidden but onerous terms. (Useful material on predatory lending and the subprime mortgage market can be found here)
A financial innovation that indirectly helped the emerging sub-prime mortgage market and the practice of predatory lending was “securitization”. Securitization, in the context of the mortgage market, meant pooling together hundreds and thousands of mortgage loans together and then selling bonds on that pool of mortgages. Investors buying those bonds – the mortgage backed bonds – received the income stream, both the principal and the interest, entailed by the mortgages as the mortgage borrowers serviced their debt. Securitization required that the entities, usually investment banks like Bear Stearns or Merril Lynch, that were issuing (i.e., selling) mortgage backed securities (the mortgage backed bonds or other kinds of assets backed by the mortgage pool) needed ownership of the pool of mortgages against which those mortgage backed securities were being issued. Thus, the entities that issued the mortgage backed securities went out and bought mortgage loans from the originators of the mortgages, i.e., those who sold the mortgage loan to the borrower, like Country Wide Financial (the largest mortgage seller in the US prior to the financial collapse).
The fact that mortgage loan originators had a market where they could sell off the mortgage loans they had originated created perverse incentives for the originators. Typically mortgage loan originators do a thorough screening to assess the financial background of applicants before making loans. With the emerging market for selling off mortgages, the effort at screening was reduced to zero. Things actually went even further. Since mortgages could be sold off at good prices to the investment banks, the mortgage loan originators had a incentive to start engaging in predatory lending, i.e., push mortgage loans on persons who they knew would not be able to sustain the payments entailed by the loan. Since the originator did not have to bear the risk of failure associated with non-payment of mortgage loans, they had no incentive to make prudent loans. All they had to do was to force some gullible working class person to agree to the sub-prime loan and then turn around and sell it off to some investment bank in Wall Street. Thus, the market for sub-prime mortgages proliferated, driven by rising demand coming from the Wall Street investment banks. And why were investment banks so eager to buy these sub-prime mortgages? To answer this question, let us look a little more closely at the process and results of “securitization”.
Securitization
Securitization is the division, repackaging and dispersal of debt, earning huge fee income for the entity (usually an investment bank) that is undertaking this process. The process starts with some commercial or investment bank buying a swathe of mortgages, some prime, some sub-prime, from smaller financial institutions and pooling them together. Each mortgage, recall, entails a stream of future payments; so the pool of mortgages, entails some specific stream of future payments. Various categories or “tranches” of bonds, arranged according to their risk characteristics, are then issued against the pool of underlying mortgages, i.e., against the stream of future payments entailed by the pool of mortgages. Investors who buy these bonds (mortgage backed securities) then have the claims on the mortgage payments coming through month after month after month; if some mortgage fails i.e., payments stop the lowest category (i.e., most risky) bondholder loses first, the losses travelling up the tier of the bonds.
Let us look at a specific example: Bear Stearns Alt-A Mortgage Pass-Through Certificate. This is how this mortgage backed security worked. Bear Stearns bought 2871 mortgages from different mortgage originators for a total of $1.3 billion; this mortgage pool had mortgages that had been originated in different parts of the US, each worth on average for $ 450,000. Bear Stearns then pooled these diverse mortgages and issued 37 different bonds against that pool of mortgages; these bonds were called the Alt-A Mortgage Pass-Through Certificates. Alt-A stands for a very specific kind of mortgage: a mortgage where the originator does not ask any questions about the financial situation of the borrower before making the loan. It is not even ascertained whether the person taking the loan has a stable employment or not! Two additional players come into the picture: credit rating agencies and insurance companies.
Since many investors had an idea that the mortgage backed bonds were risky investments, they required some “independent” rating agency like Standard & Poor’s or Moody’s to ascertain the riskiness associated with investing in those bonds. This is one of the typical functions of credit rating agencies: to ascertain the riskiness (i.e., risk of default) of bonds and assign a credit rating to it; credit ratings run from AAA/Aaa (least risky) to C/D (in default). There were two problems with the involvement of credit rating agencies in the whole securitization process. First, there was an acute shortage of reliable information about the mortgages in the underlying pool; recall how the mortgages in the pool had originated in very different geographical locations, had been offered to very different income categories of people. Most importantly, very little information was collected about the financial standing of the borrowers (especially in Alt-A mortgages). So, despite their best efforts, the credit rating agencies could not come up with realistic risk assessment of the bonds issued against the pool of mortgages. The second problem was even more serious: a conflict of interest. Who paid the fees to the credit rating agencies? The same investment banks that issued the mortgage backed bonds; thus, there was a real incentive for the rating agencies to underplay the risk and certify most of the bonds as “investment grade”. That is more or less what happened, as we now know.
The other player in the securitization process was an insurance provider; since investment in mortgage backed securities (and other related assets) carried some risk investors wanted insurance against default. The instrument that was used to provide insurance for such transactions was the credit default swap (CDS), a derivative financial instrument. Suppose an investor bought bonds worth $1 million; then, to insure herself against the possibility of default she could buy CDS from some financial firm like AIG on those bonds. The insurance premium that she had to pay, called the CDS rate or spread, was typically in the range of 1-2 percent of the value of the bonds, $1 million in this case. She would thus pay $ 20,000 (if the CDS rate was 2 percent) and the CDS contract would protect her against default for the period of the validity of the contract (typically a few years). In the bonds were to go into default the firm that had issued the CDS would have to pay her the amount of her losses.
There were several problems with the CDS market. First, it was an over-the-counter (OTC) market and did not operate through an exchange; hence the possibility of monitoring or regulating this market were negligible. All the contracts were bilateral contracts and no one other than the two parties to the exchange could, in principle know the details of the contract. Second, unlike traditional insurance contracts, there were no reserve requirements. Thus, the financial entity selling the CDS was not required, by law, to hold any reserves against the CDS issued, unlike traditional insurance. So, if the CDS were to actually come due there was no guarantee that the firm that had issued the CDS would be in a situation to make good it’s side of the contract. Third, the most bizarre aspect of the CDS market was that the investor buying the CDS was not required to hold the underlying assets.
This third aspect is truly incredible and led to a veritable explosion of speculation. Let us think about this for a minute. It meant that if I believed GM would fail three years down the line, an investor could buy $10 million worth of CDS on GM bonds by paying a fee of $200,000 (assuming a CDS rate of 2 percent); and this the investor could do even though she did not hold any GM bonds. If GM actually failed and her bet was correct she could make $10 million on an investment of $200,000, a phenomenal 49 fold return! One could never expect to make such return by actually holding the bonds, and so investors started making huge bets using the credit default swaps instead of investing in bonds and stocks. By the end of 2007, the CDS market had grown to about $ 55 trillion (about 4 times US gross domestic product).
But who bought the asset backed securities? Who bought the CDS? International investors of all kinds. Around the late 1990s, there was an enormous pool of footloose, speculative capital in the global financial arena. The East Asian crisis, the Russian crisis and several other developing country crises freed up finance for investment in the US; and these investors wanted high returns even if that meant holding risky assets. That is precisely what the Wall Street investment banks were busy churning out: highly risky but high-return investments in the form of the asset backed securities and other more exotic assets. Hedge funds, pension funds, sovereign country funds and other large institutional investors lapped up the exotic assets which promised high returns.
But the whole edifice was built on very shaky foundations. This highly-leveraged investment game could remain profitable if either of two conditions were met: (a) mortgage payments kept coming in, and (b) house prices kept moving up. If mortgage payments stopped coming in, the property could be taken over and sold; hence sub-prime mortgages remained profitable investments even when the borrower was almost certain to default as long as house prices kept moving up. In the middle of 2006 house prices stopped rising and foreclosures started piling up; and then the whole process, the whole speculative game, started unravelling.
To the Short-term once again
With the medium term story more or less under our belts, let us return once more to the short term story and ask: why did Bear Stearns fail? Why did Lehman Brothers fail? Why was Fannie and and Freddie nationalized? What caused the near-collapse of AIG? Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers went under for very similar reasons: they could not keep borrowing to finance their positions. Towards the end of it’s life, Lehman was rolling over close to $ 100 billion a month to finance it’s investments in real estate, stocks, asset-backed securities, bonds and other financial assets. When news of foreclosures started pouring in, investors became convinced that Lehman had big holes in it’s balance sheet because of it’s exposure to the sub-prime mortgage market. They refused to lend it money; thus it’s cost of borrowing went up, it’s stock prices plummeted and it’s credit rating was dropped. With no other option left, it had to file for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were government supported entities (GSEs) that were created to help low-income homeowners get easy access to the mortgage market. They were meant to guarantee mortgages and was supposed to finance this operation by issuing it’s own bonds which were implicitly backed by the US government. It is now clear that they did not stick to this mandate of theirs. Instead, they used the subsidized loans that they could get from the market (due to the implicit government guarantee) to invest in mortgage backed securities which were backed by pools of sub-prime mortgages. When the sub-prime mortgages started failing, these institutions started losing asset values and it became clear by mid-2007 that they could not sustain the mounting losses. At that point the government stepped in to explicitly guarantee their debt (because it was spread far and wide in the global financial system) which finally culminated in their nationalization.
AIG, the largest insurance company in the US, got into serious trouble because of the credit default swaps that it had written. Around mid-September, about $ 57 billion of insurance contracts that it had written, in the form of CDS, required it to raise serious money. The CDS were all written on bonds linked to pools of sub-prime mortgages and as the sub-prime market worsened, the possibilities of the CDS payouts coming due increased. Because of the possible losses that it could incur, credit rating agencies downgraded AIG. The way the CDS contracts were written, a credit downgrade required AIG to demonstrate that it was capable of making good on it’s contracts; this required it to immediately “post collateral” to the tune of $ 15 billion; if it failed to post collateral, it would be considered bankrupt. Since it did not have that amount of reserves and could not borrow from a tightening credit market, it had to approach the Fed for funds.
Bubble bursts: Delevarging and Deflation
An aspect of the whole build-up that made the unravelling especially painful was the stupendous amount of leverage in the financial system. When the bubble was inflating every investment was so hugely profitable that investors borrowed heavily for investing. This was especially true of the investment banks whose leverage (i.e., ratio of debt to equity) was about 30:1 by 2007; thus, for every dollar of equity these institutions had borrowed 30 dollars. And a large part of the borrowing was at the shortest end of the market. This meant that the investment banks had to continuously borrow from the market (usually roll over their debt) in order to keep financing their assets and investments. This made the system extremely fragile because any serious problem would lead to painful deleveraging (i.e., forcibly reducing debt by various means often involving serious financial loss) and possibly even asset price deflation.
As foreclosures picked up speed, house prices started moving down. Defaults on mortgage payments and falling house prices meant that the mortgage backed securities started losing value. Often this meant that when lenders came knocking on the doors for their funds, assets had to be sold at short notice and at low prices to cover debt payments coming due. A rush to sell assets often led to a further fall in the value of assets, even those not linked to mortgage backed securities, leading to worsening balance sheets in wider and wider circles. With bonds losing value and even facing default, the CDS contracts suddenly started coming into effect. Since CDS issuers like AIG had not held any reserves for such contingencies, they got into greater and greater difficulties as bonds insured by CDS contracts started failing.
Falling assets values meant that financial firms faced greater difficulty in borrowing from the market, partly because the value of assets that they could offer as collateral had already fallen. Falling collateral value often lead to increasing costs of borrowing in terms of higher interest rates. Difficulty is accessing funds gives another push to sell off assets to cover debt payments, taking the spiral one step down. Deleveraging and an asset price deflation and a string of failures and rescues really led the financial system, in mid-September 2008, to completely lose faith in itself; it is this severe loss of confidence that manifested itself in the credit freeze, the center piece of the short-term story.
Before we move on to looking at the global economic crisis from a medium term perspective, i.e., before we take a look at the phenomenon of the house price bubble and associated speculation that created the grounds for the current credit crisis, it might not be amiss to focus on what can be done in the short-run to deal with the real consequences of the economic crisis: the deep and prolonged recession that the US economy will undoubtedly be pushed into. Real GDP figures released by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on October 30 indicated that the US economy was in the midst of a slowdown even before the financial storm hit the world economy in the middle of September. Real GDP in the US contracted at an annual rate of 0.3 percent for the third quarter (i.e., for the months of July, August and September), led by a sharp fall in consumer spending; businesses cut 240,000 jobs in October alone, the highest figure in 14 years. The financial storm, comprising a severe credit crisis and even a possible banking crisis, worsened the slowdown further. In such a scenario, fixing the financial mess, dealing with the credit freeze, averting a possible run on the commercial banking system and restoring confidence in the financial system will not be enough to prevent a plunge into a deep, prolonged and painful recession; addressing the credit crisis is necessary but not sufficient to deal with the grave crisis in the real sector. A direct and aggressive boost to aggregate demand is the only way to prevent the current recession from becoming a depression. Why is that so?
In any capitalist economy, such as the US economy, the level of aggregate economic activity and employment is determined, in the short run, by the level of aggregate demand, and fluctuations in employment and output are accordingly determined by fluctuations of aggregate demand. Aggregate demand is defined as the sum total of all expenditures on goods and services produced in the economy. Macroeconomists divide total expenditure that make up aggregate demand into four categories: consumption expenditure, investment expenditure, government expenditure and net export expenditure. Consumption expenditure is the total spending by households on durable and non-durable goods, and also services; investment expenditure is the total spending by firms on plant, equipment, machinery and inventories, and the residential investment expenditures by households; government expenditure includes the total spending by local, state and federal government agencies on goods and services (excluding transfer payments); and net export expenditure is the net amount that foreigners spend on buying goods and services produced in the domestic economy.
BEA figures released for the third quarter show that every component of aggregate demand emanating from the private sector of the US (or foreign) economy either declined or slowed down when compared to the second quarter. In real terms, consumption expenditure decreased by 3.1 percent, the steepest decline since 1980 when the US economy was in the grip of a severe recession; during the previous recession in 2001, consumption expenditures had not even declined. Investment expenditures, other than those devoted to maintaining inventories, have also declined. Real nonresidential fixed investment expenditures decreased 1.0 percent in the third quarter, in contrast to an increase of 2.5 percent in the second. Expenditures on nonresidential structures increased by 7.9 percent, compared with a much higher increase of 18.5 percent in the last quarter; expenditures on equipment and software decreased 5.5 percent. Real residential fixed investment decreased 19.1 percent, compared with a decrease of 13.3 percent in the second quarter. Demand emanating from the external sector has a similar story to tell: even though exports registered a positive growth, the growth had slowed down considerably falling from 12.3 to 5.9 percent.
This is hardly surprising. With credit drying up, home equity vanishing and layoffs increasing, working-class households cannot be expected to increase their expenditures on the purchase of goods and services; a continued decline in the stock markets, coupled with increasing volatility will make matters worse. A recent survey in the US showed that consumer confidence was at it’s lowest value in 40 years, and so it is almost certain that consumption expenditure will not rise in the foreseeable future. Neither will export expenditures rise to shore up aggregate demand because most of the economies in the world are either already into a recession or are rapidly slowing down. Nor can firms be expected to increase their expenditures on plant and machinery and equipment. And the problem here is more than a credit freeze: even if the credit markets were to ease due to government intervention, which it is adamantly refusing to do, firms might not be willing to expand their operations because they face sagging demand. Capitalist firms produce to make profits; if they expect markets to be down and demand to fall, they will cut back and not increase their expenditures even if the cost of financing goes down.
That leaves us with government expenditure as the only source for increasing aggregate demand. In the midst of possibly the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the US government needs to aggressively step up it’s expenditure on goods and services; since private expenditures, either of firms or of households, cannot be expected to increase in the short-term, aggressive fiscal intervention seems to be the only way the US government can prevent the economy from sliding into a decade long L-shaped recession that was Japan’s fate in the 1990s. Moreover, such expenditures are warranted even from a long-term perspective of economic growth. Rebuilding the crumbling public infrastructure like roads and bridges, improving and widening the ambit of the public transport systems in US cities, jump-starting the movement towards green technologies, making health care available to all working-class Americans, increasing the unemployment benefit substantially, investing in the educational infrastructure makes both short-term and long-term sense. It will help boost aggregate demand in the short run and prevent a slide into a prolonged recession, and in the long run it will build the physical and human capital to help take the US economy into a higher growth trajectory.
Two alternatives to boost the economy, which are often brought up in this context, also seem to have lost their efficacy: tax breaks and monetary policy. Tax breaks have already been tried out and does not seem to have worked; reeling under mountains of debt, the tax break (or refund) cheque is often used by households not for making new purchases but for reducing the outstanding debt. The second alternative, monetary policy action, is also rapidly reaching the point where it will become totally ineffective. For it is almost certain now that the US economy is already stuck in what John Maynard Keynes long ago called a liquidity trap, a situation where the Central Bank can no longer boost aggregate demand by reducing interest rates. The Fed has already reduced the target federal funds rate to 1 percent and reducing it further to 0 percent, the lowest it can go, will possibly not help. Even if confidence in the financial system is restored and nominal interest rates lowered, this might not increase borrowing by firms because of their bleak forecast of falling demand for the goods they produce. Monetary policy has reached it’s limits; the only option to ward off a severe recession and decrease the pain on the working class seems to be aggressive fiscal intervention in terms of direct expenditure on goods and services by the US government.
Even though the credit crisis attained dangerous proportions only in mid-September, it had already announced itself in the early part of the year with the collapse of Bear Stearns, one of the five famed investment banks that defined Wall Street; today none of those five investment banks – Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehmann Brothers, Merril Lynch and Morgan Stanley – exist, an indication of the depth of the crisis. Faced with a fierce run on it’s dwindling reserves and it’s stock plummeting, Bears Stearns was forced to sell itself off to J P Morgan Chase (one of the largest commercial banks in the US) on March 16, 2008. The next three months could be best described in terms that the police often use in India: tense but under control. On July 01, the next piece of bad news emerged and shattered the uneasy calm: Country Wide Financials, the largest mortgage seller in the US, collapsed and was acquired by Bank of America (one of the largest commercial banks in the US). Following closely on the heels of this event, IndyMac bank failed – the second largest bank failure in US history – and was taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), one of the institutions responsible for monitoring the health of the banking system in the US. IndyMac was, unsurprisingly perhaps, part of the Country Wide financial family.
Things started speeding up in September. On September 08, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two government supported enterprises (GSE) operating in the mortgage market was nationalized, with assets of the two entities totalling to more than $ 5 trillion. On September 15 another of the five famed investment banks, Lehmann Brothers, filed for bankruptcy; Lehmann’s assets were a little over $ 600 billion and this made it’s bankruptcy filing the largest in US history. Next day, the Fed stepped in with a $ 85 billion loan to prevent American International Group (AIG), the largest insurance firm in the US from going under. These two events, Lehmann’s bankruptcy filing and AIG’s rescue, sent shock waves through the world financial system. The result was a rapid erosion of faith in the financial system leading to a veritable credit freeze: financial institutions stopped lending, to other financial institutions, to businesses and to consumers.
The next thirty six hours, from the morning of September 17 to the evening of September 18, accelerated the credit crisis to extremely dangerous proportions and convinced the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve that government intervention of unheard magnitudes (at least since the Great Depression) would be necessary to prevent total financial collapse. Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve (the US Central Bank), was famously reported as saying, at one point during this 36 hours, that if the government did not save the (financial) markets now there might not be any financial markets in the future. So, what happened during those crucial 36 hours?
The crucial 36 hours
The first indication of a severe stress in the financial system was a shooting up of credit default swap (CDS) rates, especially on Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs (two of the famed five Wall Street investment banks) debt, during the early hours of September 17. Credit default swaps are insurance contracts that can protect bondholders against the possibility of default. For example if an investor has bought bonds worth $ 1 million issued by firm A, then the investor can also buy CDS – typically issued by financial institutions like large commercial banks, investment banks or insurance companies – to protect herself against a possible loss resulting from firm A defaulting on it’s bonds; the premium that the investor pays for the CDS is called the “rate” or “spread” and it is typically around 2% of the amount insured (the “notional value”). So, in the case of this example, the investor would pay $ 20,000 to buy CDS and if firm A were to go under, then the “counterparty” to the CDS contract (i.e., the financial institution that issued the CDS to the investor) would step in to pay the investor $ 1 million and the interest on that amount.
CDS rates (i.e., the premiums that are paid on the insurance contracts) are, thus, an indication of the market’s belief about the possibility of default of some institutions; CDS rates on bonds issued by firms are typically low when the market thinks the probability of default of those firms are low and high when the market thinks the probability of default are high. Thus, on the morning of September 17, when CDS rates went through the roof, this provided evidence of severe loss of faith in the financial system.
When investors lose faith in the financial instruments issued by private parties, they turn back to those issued by the government and that is what happened when CDS rates multiplied by close to a factor of five. Investors let go of private financial instruments like hot bricks and rushed into US government securities, a phenomenon often described as “flight to safety”. The US government, i.e., the US Treasury department, issues three primary kinds of securities: T-bills, T-notes and T-bonds (where the “T” stands for Treasury), where bills mature in less than a year, notes mature between one and ten years and bonds are of longer maturities than a decade. When investors lost faith in the private financial system, they rushed in to US T-bills, the short-run heavily-traded ultra-safe US government securities. This huge rush into T-bills pushed up the price of T-bills and drove the yield (i.e., interest rate) on T-bills down. At one point in time, during this 36 hour period, the yield on T-bills was pushed down all the way to zero (the lowest it can ever go to) implying that investors were willing to hold T-bills even though the nominal return was zero and real returns were negative (because the inflation rate was positive).
As private investors were madly rushing into the safety of US T-bills, another important event was unfolding in the mutual funds market. Money market mutual funds (MMMF) are financial institutions that have become popular over the last three decades, especially in the US. They typically work as follows: investors put their money in MMMF’s by purchasing shares in the MMMF’s stock; thus the MMMF becomes a mechanism for pooling huge amounts of money and then using those large sums for investing in a very diversified portfolio of financial assets, thereby making the investments extremely safe. Thus MMMF’s were, till September 17, thought to be as safe as a deposit account in a commercial bank, and the added advantage was that the money invested in MMMF shares would give a positive rate of return as opposed to a deposit account which is usually non-interest bearing. On September 17, one of the oldest and largest MMMF’s, Reserve Primary Fund, “broke the buck”, i.e., it made losses on it’s investments such that it could not guarantee a positive return to it’s shareholders. Every dollar invested in Reserve Primary was now, by it’s own admission, worth less than a dollar. This was an unheard of event and as news of Reserve Primary Fund’s losses spread, investors started pulling money out of MMMFs.
This had a very negative consequence for the real economy because of the serious involvement of MMMFs in the commercial paper (CP) market. Businesses typically need to constantly borrow short-term funds to keep their operations going; these borrowed funds go towards funding payroll, paying suppliers, maintaining inventory, etc. Firms, at least the big ones, usually borrow short-term funds in the US by issuing commercial paper (which is essentially a bond with a short maturity of about a week or a month). Who buys commercial papers? The most active institutional investors in the CP market are the MMMFs; some of the largest chunks of commercial papers are bought by the MMMFs. So when the MMMFs faced an increasing spate of withdrawal, in the wake of Reserve Primary Fund’s breaking the buck, they stopped buying commercial paper. This, essentially, meant that the CP market ground to a halt. Thus businesses were no longer able to borrow the short-term funds that they need to keep operating. The economy, by all means, shut down.
Adding to and going hand-in-hand with these processes were the growing problems in the interbank (lending) market. Commercial banks typically lend and borrow banking system reserves (roughly the sum of currency in the banks’ vaults and the amount they hold in their account with the Central Bank) among themselves for very short periods, usually overnight periods. The interbank lending market that is most closely watched is the London interbank market and the rate at which loans are made in this market is the London Inter Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR). The most important characteristic of loans in the interbank market is that they are unsecured, i.e., they are not backed by collateral. Thus, a bank can get a loan in the interbank market only if other banks consider it financially sound; thus when the LIBOR jumps up suddenly it provides evidence that the largest and the best banks in the world have lost faith on each other. On September 17, the LIBOR shot up giving indication of increasing strain in the interbank market.
It was these sets of events – CDS rates shooting up, closing down of the CP market, increasing strain in the interbank market – that spooked the US administration and convinced them of the necessity of the most extensive government intervention in the financial markets since the Great Depression. These crucial sets of events were precipitated by the string of big financial failures that the US economy had witnessed over the first two weeks of September: the failure of Fannie and Freddie, the bankruptcy of Lehmann and the near-collapse of AIG. It was these failures that led to a rapid loss of faith in the financial system and heralded a full-blown credit crisis. And why did Fannie and Freddie and Lehmann and AIG fail? All these financial institutions failed because at crucial points in time they could no longer raise money from the market to finance their assets, i.e., they could not borrow money or roll over their short-term debt; financing, for these institutions, had dried up. And why did financing dry up for these big and reputed financial institutions? Because each of these, in their own ways, were exposed to the subprime mortgage market and took huge losses when the subprime mortgage market started unravelling. As news of these failures spread, investors, fearing losses, became increasingly unwilling to lend money to these institutions.
