<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1458" name=GENERATOR> <STYLE></STYLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=#ffffff> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>many thanks to Doug, Travis and Patrick for their responses to my piece.</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>On permanent crises, James O'Connor might think that capitalism has been in crisis since the thirteenth century (I am not sure it even existed then), but that old fool Karl Marx stubbornly stuck to his belief that "Permanent crises do not exist." (Theories of Surplus Value, Vol II, p 497, fn)</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>On the metaphor, it's Ulrich Beck's not mine. He meant that people are often prisoners of ideas handed down from the past, and that these categories are something like the living dead walking the night, only because they haven't been replaced by other categories.</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I don't see this as depressing as Travis does. That people should enjoy some well being does not seem so awful. I don't think there is a need to invent problems when there are real ones in the here and now to address - such as the war in Iraq, or the assault on civil liberties, or the promotion of personal insecurity by states.</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>