| This question <605|824> overall <608|613> Hans: <599|682>. |
| Question 401: Describe how and why commodity circulation contains the possibility of crisis. |
| [611] Hans: Long email about crises. Two situations, symmetric to each other, are given the name “crisis” by Marx. A crisis is either the forcible unification of two things that need to be together due to inner necessity but are separated too much by some external process, or the forcible separation of two things that need to be separate due to inner necessity but are united in a stifling way by some external process. Only the first kind of crisis appears in the readings. Examples of the second kind of crisis are the Triffin dilemma [2005fa:957] and divorce [2005fa:1659]. |
| The looming climate catastrophe is an example of the first kind of crisis. By inner necessity, the behavior of societies must be compatible with the ecological laws maintaining the conditions of their survival. The historical record shows that civilizations which were not aware of the environmental conditions of their existence have sometimes collapsed. See Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Penguin 2005. This is a type of crisis in which the two things that belong together are inside one another. Human civilization is part of a larger ecological system. If human actions are incompatible with the continued functioning of the system, this may at first not even be noticed, but in the long run it cannot remain without consequences. James Lovelock writes: |
| We have grown in numbers to the point where our presence is perceptibly disabling the planet like a disease. As in human diseases there are four possible outcomes: destruction of the invading disease organisms; chronic infection; destruction of the host; or symbiosis -- a lasting relationship of mutual benefit to the host and the invader. (James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of humanity, Basic Books 2006 p. xvi) |
| The desirable symbiotic outcome is not uncommon in physiology; many parts of our bodies incorporate alien organisms which entered as invaders and, after a period of mutual adaptation became part of a new and more powerful whole. For the climate dilemma it would mean a society in which humans act as responsible stewarts of the planet. |
| Lovelock's first and third outcomes would by Marx be called “crisis outcomes,” the fourth outcome is a resolution of the contradiction, and the second outcome is a “draw” between the opposing sides. Marx tries to show, in Capital, that the movement from contradiction to its resolution in a higher more encompassing unity not only occurs at such ultimate points of conflict as diseases or climate change, but is part of the normal evolution of social relations. To bring only one instance of many, the separation of the world of commodities into ordinary commodities on the one hand and money on the other is the resolution of the inner contradiction between use-value and exchange-value in every commodity; and liquidity crises remind us that this resolution is still contradictory, although now on a higher level. |
| When looking at Dabears's [605] I realized that my definition of the second type of crises in [2005fa:1659] was not well formulated. It should better read: |
| The forcible separation of two moments which are, despite being essentially different, united by an external bond, is a crisis. |
| And I didn't catch all the errors in Thugtorious's [2005fa:1558]. Here is a wordy paraphrase of his submission in which the errors I had not seen are eliminated: |
| A crisis-prone situation is a situation where two things are separate that belong together. The actual crisis itself is when these two things are reunified through a forcible act. In commodity circulation, a crisis-prone situation comes about when the direct barter is subdivided into two acts: the sale and the purchase. As Marx says, this division allows the process to transcend space and time barriers. A person that sells a good does not need to immediately purchase another good. Within C-M-C circulation a person can choose to hoard their money instead of injecting directly back into circulation. This separation enables therefore the circulation process to do things which it could not do without the separation. But it also generates the potential for a crisis. Since these two aspects have their inner unity and interdependence, and since they have been divorced in commodity circulation, the potential exists that they stray too far away from each other, so that they must be re-united by a forcible act, a crisis. However, this is at this point only an abstract possibility. In other words, in Simple commodity circulation, the two halves into which the direct barter has been split up will probably not be so far removed from each other that a crisis is provoked, since there is no reason for everybody to want to sell and nobody to want to by. Deeper connections in the structure of capitalist society are necessary to turn this abstract possibility of crisis into the necessity of crisis. |
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