Darn, you got me there! Ok, I admit, it's been a while - Harvey's Reading K class in 1985 - since I've gone over that passage.
> Crisis is a * momentary* (not forty-years long), violent eruption.
Just ponder, however, that this was written pre-Keynes. What if crises are now longer-term processes that have much more sophisticated elite management and partial-devalorisation and displacement techniques than in the late 19th century. Then James, you don't want to be caught in a description that is so time-bound, do you? That's why I think Robert Cox's is a much more useful approach.
> I think
> the terminological difference here is that Patrick is using the concepts
> 'crisis' and 'law of motion' interchangeably
No, the 'laws of motion' are about accumulation dynamics that are
untenable over time; and they give rise to crises. One is cause the
other effect.
> (the coinage 'crisis
> formation' rather blurs the difference). But the Capitalist law of motion,
> or law of accumulation, is the constant, and the crisis, is a specific
> manifestation of the underlying law of motion, evidence of
> 'overaccumulation'.
Agreed.
> It is wrong, incidentally, to think that the only thing
> that Capitalism does is tend towards crisis. It also expands the productive
> base.
Of course, up to a point.
> ... The British
> economy did grow for fifty consecutive quarters over that period, so if your
> conceptual apparatus cannot account for that, you should fix it.
>
But that's my point; you took only the growth period, so it's a bogus basis of apples/oranges to other periods which also include recessions. Ah never mind.
> I did explain to you what had happened, you just could not hear me. The
> forcible resolution of the crisis in the 1980s was at the expense of the
> working class.
That's just one of several causal processes, you know. I don't like
going in that direction with my analysis for a few reasons I'll get into
another day when there's more time.
> The subprime crisis is indeed serious, but it is most certainly not the
> manifestation of a crisis of overaccumulation, for the simple reason that
> the Western economies have not experienced overaccumulation - on the
> contrary, Europe in particular continues to experience historically low
> rates of business investment,
But *because* of sustained overaccumulation at the world scale... Ok?! Nah I know you won't believe it until I come up with stats. (Somebody give me a sabbatical and a quiet country to live in.)
Ciao, Patrick