Gilroy; Starring: WILLIAM CONRAD as Nero Wolfe; LEE HORSLEY as Archie Goodwin; GEORGE WYNER as Saul Panzer; ROBERT COOTE as Theodore Horstmann; GEORGE VOSKOVEC as Fritz Brenner; ALLAN MILLER as Inspector Cramer; Pilot/Opening episode: A publisher publishes a book about the FBI in which puts them in an unflattering light.
Creators: William Link [Murder, She Wrote], David Chisholm; Executive Producers: William Link, David Chisholm; Writers: William Link, David Chisholm; Producer: Director: Bradford May; Cinematographer: Eric Van Haren Noman; Original Music: Lee Holdridge; Location Manager: Ellen Lent (credited as Ellen Winchell); Aerial Coordinator: Robert "Bobby Z" Zajonc; Starring: Edward Woodward (The Equalizer) as Maxwell Beckett; Jessica Lundy as Nikki Page; Gregory Itzin as Cosby; Jill Tracy as Wendy; Edward Winter as Chief Shirer; Dan Ferro as Tony Rialdo; Brenda Thomson as Lacey; Ivory Ocean as Brainard; Mike Genovese as Page; Vernee Watson-Johnson; Frank Ryan; Mary Jo Catlett;
In the first place, impressionistically, if what has happened has not been ruin enough, what would be? We have had a quarter-century of "deindustrialisation". There were great waves of bankruptcies and closures in the USA under Paul Volcker's direction of the Federal Reserve in 1979-83, and in Britain under Thatcher simultaneously. Brenner documents "a vast restructuring" of Japanese industry after the oil shock of 1973 (which hit Japan especially hard). Everywhere there has been drastic economic and technological reorganisation. Although most Marxists in the early 1970s (including me) expected the economic turmoil to lead to increased tariffs and import controls if not trade wars, the actual development has been the opposite, to deregulation and freer-flowing trade. Capitalist governments have responded to ruinous competition – if that was the crux of the problem – not by trying to stifle it but by making large economic areas “free-fire” zones.
Anwar Shaikh, another Marxist economist associated with Robert Brenner's magazine Against the Current, contends that the warlike character of capitalist competition means that capitalists will generally make massive investments in fixed assets which enable them to produce extra at reduced extra current cost and thus drive their rivals out of business but reduce their ratio of profit to total investment (Shaikh 1978). Shaikh, however, offers no empirical evidence that capitalists do this generally, rather than exceptionally. He assumes an "excessively" fast rate of innovation, while a large volume of socialist comment, from Marx onwards, has rather found cause to indict capitalism for failing to introduce new techniques which cut labour-time but may not cut wage-costs.
Brenner deals with this question by tracing in some detail the movements of currency exchange rates (which include many erratic ups and downs as well as the long-term trends), and successive government policies in the USA, Germany and Japan. The gist of his argument, if I've understood right, is that the "ruinous competition" which suddenly hit capitalism in 1965-73 then became semi-permanent. As the big capitalist manufacturing corporations sought to make good on their huge fixed assets, tangible or intangible; as governments and banks aided them by allowing a great rise in debt; as other government policies restricted home markets everywhere and sent manufacturers everywhere on a no-win chase to export to a consequently depressed global market; and as new manufacturing-export bases emerged in East Asia – as all these trends persisted, there were always lower-cost producers somewhere (where, at each moment, depended on the movement of currency exchange rates) pushing down prices, and higher-cost producers elsewhere ready and able to accept lower profit rates to stay in business. Thus “the further strategies individual capitalists found it best to adopt… continued to bring about an insufficiency of exit and too much entry, exacerbating the initial problem of manufacturing overcapacity and overproduction". The competition was ruinous, but not (or not allowed to be) ruinous enough, and so it remained ruinous.
Historical Materialism no.4 gives most of its 320 pages to 10 reviews of Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence. The most extreme, but thus clearest, representative of the general trend is the review by Gugliemo Carchedi, who hotly denounces Brenner as insufficiently Marxist and insists that the “global turbulence” since the early 1970s can and must be explained by the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall expounded by Marx in volume 3 of Capital.
The first service of Robert Brenner's book-length study of The Economics of Global Turbulence (New Left Review no.229) is a demolition of the myth of unparallelled US prosperity in the 1990s. Output, investment, and productivity all grew unusually slowly for a boom phase in the regular boom-slump cycle. Wages mostly stagnated. The limited advances in profit rates, and their exaggerated reflection in the gaudy rise of the stock market, were only the flipside of a punishing war against labour, described well by Brenner.
Here is Lenin's reference to Marx that was cited by > Shachtman to support his analysis that the postbellum South was not > "purely capitalistic" in terms of Robert Brenner's schema:> > "America provides the most graphic confirmation of the truth > emphasized > by Marx in Capital, Volume III, that capitalism in agriculture does > not > depend on the form of land ownership or land tenure.
Cannell; Production Manager: Brent-Karl Clackson (the new Outer Limits); Director: Music: Starring: DALE ROBERTSON as Jerome Jeremiah "J.J." Starbuck; BEN VEREEN as E.
Lawrence Jacoby; HARRY GOAZ as Deputy Andy Brennan; PEGGY LIPTON as Norma Jennings; CHRIS MULKEY as Hank Jennings; KIMMY ROBERTSON as Lucy Moran; DAVID LYNCH as Gordon Cole; CATHERINE E.