>>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?
Yes, I suppose so, but, to pursue your root metaphor, things that happen in the bark or in the leaves can do some serious damage to a tree.
>If not, then what is your argument for socialism?
That capitalism is a horribly polarizing, exploitative, unstable, alienating, and destructive system combined with a hope that people could do better than that.
>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).
Some feedback mechanisms: credit that helps feed overinvestment; debts that leave a firm or household vulnerable to a decline in income; psychosocial mechanisms that feed a bubble, like allow credit to expand dangerously as in the first two examples, or feed a bust, like widened risk spreads and credit rationing that deny credit to marginal units. Keynes went way too far and became a sentiment fundamentalist, but Marxism needs to absorb some of it. Marxism also needs to think about the structures of fantasy that sustain the status quo. But Zizek says that Lacan said that Marx invented the symptom.
Doug