On Aug 11, 2007, at 7:48 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
> Doug, the 'reproduction of a system' was not really in doubt in
> 1929-32, but
> capitalist 'crisis' was not a bad description of those years, surely?
>
> Why not advance to the Robert Cox definition which - I'm nowhere
> near my
> copy of Production Power and World Order - if I recall is that a
> 'crisis'
> sets in when the system's natural self-corrective mechanisms no
> longer work
> to stabilise or equilibrate the system, and problems get worse, hence
> requiring an *external* 'solution' to (or at minimum displacement
> of) the
> problem that is contrary to the system's internal logic.
>
> So a major stock market 'correction' which devalorises vast sums
> (was it $7
> trillion for the dot.com 'crisis') would represent such a state.
I'm not sure that Cox's definition is all that different from mine, but in any case...yes it was about $7 trillion lost stock market value between 2000 and 2002 (from $17.8 trillion to $9.4 trillion, which brought nominal capitalization back to 1996 levels). And the consequences of that "crisis" were...a few years of subpar employment growth, and an unemployment rate than peaked at 6.3%. Henry Blodget became a journalist and fiction writer, a few execs went to jail, and Ken Lay made a premature exit. The consequences in the political and cultural sphere approximated zero. Then we launched a housing mania.
Doug