>You're forgetting just how qualified that declaration was, and how many
>caveats followed it . I've been hearing about crises of overproduction
>ever since I started paying attention to this sort of thing about 20
>ago. The theoretical root of this analysis of crisis go back 150 years.
>How is this crisis different from all the other crises? Is this really
>one, and all the earlier ones just false positives? And even if it is a
>crisis of overproduction, how do we know how that will work itself out?
>Massive deflation, moderate deflation? 5 years of 15% unemployemnt? 10
>years of 7%? Will all the sting of this crisis be felt in Southeast Asia
>Latin America, or will it sting the U.S. and Western Europe too? If so,
>how much?
All fascinating questions. The debate will certainly continue so long as crises are endemic to the economic system--that is to say, so long as there is private ownership in the means of production. Otherwise, socialism is meaningless. That's all I was asking: Don't we agree that crises are rooted in production (in the private ownership of the means of production). I personally revel in the intricacies of the debates over the mediations by which the fundamental contradiction between the relations of production and forces of production realizes itself on the surface of society.
>Are state policies completely impotent in the face of "objective forces"?
What are the objective forces?
>A "symptom" is more than a symptom if it affects how people react.
Fever is a symptom of the flu virus. We react to the fever. How does that make it more than a symptom?
>Or is the truly Marxist position to believe that cause and effect flow
>just one way, from the real/productive to the psychosocial/financial?
This is precisely the question that makes your work so compelling. Do you agree that crises are rooted in production? If not, then what is your argument for socialism? If so, then what are the feedback effects from the psychosocial/financial to the real/productive? (There are surely better concepts available to talk about this problem).
Edwin (Tom) Dickens