--- On Sat, 1/31/09, SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:
From: SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Fwd: S&S Call for Papers To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Date: Saturday, January 31, 2009, 3:23 AM
Julio Huato wrote:
> This may be of interest.
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Julio Huato <juliohuato at gmail.com>
> Date: Jan 30, 5:35 pm
> Subject: S&S Call for Papers
> To: Marxist Debate
> http://groups.google.com/group/marxist-debate
>
> Science & Society
> http://www.scienceandsociety.com/
>
> CALL FOR PAPERS
> MARXISM AND CRISIS IN 21ST-CENTURY CAPITALISM
>
This looks interesting. Please post a link when the issue comes out. There
hasn't been enough thinking yet about how the crisis might affect the
politics of accumulation in the future. Hopefully you'll get some good
pieces on this.
I'm a little skeptical of this framework for analyzing the nature of the crisis itself, though:
> The recent collapse of financial markets, housing, commodity prices,
> and employment has shattered the myths of neoliberalism and market
> fundamentalism. But conventional accounts of the crisis, focused on
> the role of subprime mortgage lending, complex mortgage-backed
> securities, derivatives, "shadow" banking, deleveraging, and
> widespread fraud leaves the deeper structural issues of capital
> accumulation, class relations, and systemic evolution out of the
> picture. How should the current crisis be understood in light of
> Marxist theoretical conceptions of capitalist dynamics?
>
All that stuff about securitization, leverage, the shadow banking system - that stuff really did cause the crisis, at least in a proximate sense. Yet I don't think there are any specifically Marxist conceptions of capitalist dynamics that would have anything significant to say about any of that. The problem is that while better mainstream economists can at least try to talk about *both* the wonky finance stuff and the deeper structural issues, Marxists tend to dismiss all that boring finance talk and jump straight into an attempt to cram everything into a deep Marxist structural framework - which is almost impossible to do persuasively because, again, there is no specifically Marxist theory of, say, financial fragility or the breakdown of the savings-investment channel.
SA^^^^^^^^CB: I think you make a good point here, SA.How about the Marxists' role in this beingto tell the many that their gut feelings are correct: that since there is no moral hazardproblem with bailing out the biggest banks,moral hazard in general is a fraud, and thereis no reason not to bailout the average workingclass debtor ? Forgive all student loans, etc.a true Jubilee is economically doable. This isa unique historical possibility because thefinancial oligarchs have openly engorged themselveswith public cash. Everybody knows it. The Emperoris naked, and everybody is saying it. ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk