^^^^^
CB: If the nation-state is broken down, what institutions will impose and enforce controls ? World Government ? The UN ?

The definition of a state is a special repressive apparatus, standing bodies of armed personnel, prisons , etc.

layoffs = death

The immiseration thesis does not claim that a majority of the working class is always immiserated in all countries; particularly the rich imperialist countries have richer sections of the working class, bourgeoisified sections of the workers. Even Groucho and Harpo noted this about sections of British workers. However, There is a mass of immiserated workers, wage earners, rank and file consumers constantly and consistently created by capitalism, a pulsating “pole” in contrast with the opposite pole of rich, getting richer, nowadays getting richer faster than in the immediate past. This immiseration of a mass, even if minority of the whole working class, occurs even in booms times of the business cycle ,is even large during long booms , or predominantly boom periods, as in the US for 25 years lately. The immiseration thesis is a legacy of Groucho , and his absolute general law of capitalist accumulation, more important than any theory Groucho might have had about a business cycle. Groucho didn’t write a definite such theory. Rather later economic scholars piece such theories together by picking through volumes of Big Business. The law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as part of some piecemeal theory of Marx on the business cycle derives from parts of Vol. III. Groucho didn’t even finish Vol. III, but turned to other studies , such as anthropology. Why didn’t Groucho finish Vol. III if it was so important to his ideas. Why leave it to Harpo to put together ? Because it wasn’t central. The business cycle is not central to the critique of capital. The absolute general law of capitalist accumulation is written out completely by Groucho in Vol. I and it is so fancifully named because it is more important than the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in Groucho’s conception of his own total thesis.
Groucho’s discussion of immiseration includes discussion of the lumpen proletariat, thus, crime , thus imprisonment. Mass imprisonment in the US today is a major expression of immiseration or locus of impact of capitalist mass immiseration. The prison-industrial-complex is a major immiserating institution of modern capitalism , especially in the U.S.

The working class victims of crime are immiserated by a major institution of US capitalism, crime. This is another mass immiseration process continually operating , boom or bust , in US capitalism
Layoffs contribute to the increase in the relative surplus population.

There several other major immiserating institutions as well, and all of them substantially negate , for a great mass of the population( its relative surplus section )the enjoying fulfillment of the unusually great mass of commodities, goods and services, personal consumption in the US.

layoffs = pauperization and misery

Charles

^^^^^^^

Millions in the Slammer
We Must Reverse America’s Zeal to Incarcerate

The US has the most prisoners and the highest jailing rate of any
country – the insanity must stop.

by Nomi Prins

The Women’s International Perspective (December 30 2007)

http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2008w04/msg00096.htm

I am just flying by to note that the problem with this is not just that non-rentiers get left out of the fictitious boom. There is a much worse problem, and that is that the amount of theoretical purchasing power loses all connection with the real-world resources available for purchase; so that, in theory, we end up with individuals or corporations who have enough money to — let’s say — buy all of the world’s fish in one week.

The engineered gap in value between raw materials and “finished” industrial product is bad enough, as Hornborg points out convincingly; but the inflation of imaginary financial instruments on top of the overvaluation of industrial output compounds (literally, as in interest) the problem. It means that there is a rolling front of overvalued money travelling well ahead of the reality of resource availability and worth, so that all of any given resource may be purchased and exhausted in (historically speaking) the blink of an eye, long before “market mechanisms” kick in to raise the price steeply as depletion is perceived.

When the wealthy have enough money to purchase (at present “market prices”) the output of entire ecosystms and foodsheds, they do == leaving nothing for anyone else. Indeed the logic of industrial capitalism dictates that they must, in order to keep fuelling runaway growth. And what that implies is the death of the biosphere and the hunger, if not outright starvation, of billions. The more extreme the disconnect between the theoretical value of the imaginary money and the actual productive potential of the biosphere — the “solar dividend” — the more rapid is the displacement of all nonhuman life by industrial consumption, and the displacement of poor people by an insatiable and growing core of wealthy people…

Compound interest was probably humanity’s second biggest mistake, right after patriarchy.

…What we are seeing is really a massive transfer of wealth; the biggest transfer ever. You see, what drew the average man into the mortgage market was the lure of getting something for nothing. Without lifting a finger, his house rose in price. He looked and thought he saw free money. He could ‘take out’ this extra wealth and still have as much equity in his house as he began with. He felt he was actually getting richer; so why not spend a little more.

The catch was that he wasn’t really getting richer at all. That is the curious thing about a boom fueled by asset price increases. They do not really make people, generally, richer. Instead, they make SOME people richer.

You already know who those people are, don’t you, dear reader? We have mentioned them often in these pages.
They are the lucky 1% of the population who have substantial assets…and the few hundred thousand who work in the financial industry. Hedge fund managers, investment bankers, substantial property owners, people who own art and antiques, even people who own stocks.
Most US stocks are less valuable, in real terms, than they were 7 or 8 ago. But they are a lot more valuable than they were 20 years ago.

For the first time in history, the rich really are getting richer at a rapid pace. Here’s how it works. The world’s central banks, led by the US Federal Reserve, and other financial intermediaries, create new forms of ‘wealth’ – paper dollars, securitized debt, derivatives, etc. Bond issuance, for example, has doubled in the last
6 years. Derivative creation has soared over $300 trillion. This ‘wealth’ never seems to reach the hands of the masses. Instead, it stays with the investing classes – bidding up prices on financial assets and other forms of wealth favored by the rich (such as London houses and works of art by people without talent). In other words, a new form of ‘inflation’ has been loosed upon the world, one which everyone seems to love. It boosts the wealth of the wealthy, spectacularly.

According to a new study by McKinsey and Co., the value of all the world’s stocks, bonds and other assets has ballooned to $140 trillion. These assets are traded across international borders. And they are growing much faster than the real economy that supports them. There you have the fundamental difference…and the theme that runs through this whole farce. A company may produce $10 in profits, growing at a rate of maybe 5% per year. But the loans, stocks, bonds, and derivative positions based on this company’s output are growing at twice the speed.

The average person works in the real economy. If he is lucky, he could see his wealth grow along with the growth of the real economy. But the people who own financial assets are watching their wealth grow much faster.

Wait, how is this possible? The real wealth of the economy depends on the real output of its real businesses. That is where the goods and services are produced. Trading, speculating, lending, acquiring, buying-back, refinancing – these are just peripheral activities that have no direct bearing on real output.
So, how can it be that one segment of the society, a very small segment at that, is getting so much richer than the growth of real output?

Ah! There’s the slick, tragic, disastrous side to this performance. It is as if the central banks had printed up huge quantities of additional dollars, and instead of distributing these to the economy at large, it gave them only to the rich. Thus, the rich gain the benefit of the inflation; their purchasing power rises dramatically.
But the rest of the population suffers it; their own purchasing power declines. They have no more income, while they have both higher living expenses; health care, housing, energy and education have all gone up sharply. And to make matters worse, they now have to pay off the money they borrowed when they thought they were getting rich.

COMMENTARY

It all began innocently enough: “The Federal Reserve, consistent with its responsibilities as the nation’s central bank, affirmed today its readiness to serve as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial system.”

More:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JA29Dj01.html

More:

http://www.wilmott.com/blogs/satyajitdas/

All this talk of smart money and money supplies does not account for how money itself “carries” value, or more precisely, how money serves as an entitlement to other people’s land, minerals, flora, fauna, time, and sweat.

When you pump money into the system with a printing press and hold its “value” up by fear, fraud, and force… you create an expanding gaseous mass of fictional value upon which everyone relies to some extent, and in a system where it is nigh impossible to separate productive from speculative returns on investment these days.

So simply saying that “money” is shifted from one pocket to another — which is what was already happening with the surplus value extracted at the point of production in the productive sector that Sanders calls “real capital” — is a pretty staggering oversimplification… even though this analysis is about a light year ahead of the shit we read in mainstream journals.

When this fictional value is liquidated by reality, there really will be a dramatic loss… wherein the strong do not take from the weak so much as heap the losses on them somehow.

At some point, however, the crisis becomes systemic, because the cause is systemic. Then the social relations are laid bare, the powers unmasked, and stability is threatened. Our kids will inherit the consequences.