A low equilibrium trap is going to seriously reduce the rate of GDP growth, strengthen recessions, reduce sector II production making sector I overcapitalisation crises more apparent. With a return in value lower than the rate of growth of value there'll be absolute and relative emiseration in the core working class of the US capital system, not just the periphery With reduced sector II production, the satisfactions of increased (potential) uses from increased (potential) volumes of goods and services representing use-values to the US working class, will mean a gap of resentment between the growth in capital's value returns and the growth in labour's value returns, as seen in history in the resentment between 1970 and 2000. Unlike Generation X in the US, this will be seen more like the failure of Post-War Italy. The structure of US class and culture looks more like the 1920s or 1890s or 1870s boom cycles. However, unlike Italy whose working class structured its resentment through the resentment of the PSI and PCI, and who lived in a bi-regional economic structure, unlike Italy where there were bitter wells to drink from, and nowhere for Capital to flee to; in the United States the well of the CIO is dry and the United States is a multi-regional economy even within the core structure of its capitalism. So, sure, yet again as with the CIO or IWW or UMW a new series of movements will arise and fail.
I don't see why this doesn't mean a PMC though: fordism itself demands it. The Great White Society as a post-war movement was about white fitters and turners, or white line workers. Sure there might be a smaller demand for engineers: but the engineering crisis was only revealed with Sputnik, and the PMC was in development long before Laika's sad song.
With more Sector I production, and less Sector II proportionately, and a slower rate of circulation of capital I'd expect more communist political success, possibly even Communist political success. Probably in Korea, Japan, Italy, France, peripheral European states in the US capital network, and possibly even the BRD. With a faster emiseration of the US working class as the solution to capital accumulation, what do you expect to happen in the semi-periphery and periphery?
Rather than an expectation of being "inside pissing out" the US white working class will have a greater expectation built in misery, more people will ask themselves (even if they don't resolve it via the Minutemen of Industrial Solidarity or whatever the next spontaneous movement captured by a "CIO" is) that most dangerous question for circulation in its moment of production, "Why not all?"
yours,
Sam R.
I for one pity the UK's treasury.
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