> SA wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Marx's conception of capitalist dynamics incorporates Hegel's idea of
> the "passions".
All of that is interesting. But it does absolutely nothing to help us explain this crisis or any other crisis. "Passions" and the attribution of worth to money are *constants*. They are always there under capitalism. Crises are *variables*. So why does liquidity preference *sometimes* shoot up and at other times decline, causing crises and recoveries? Why do some periods have rare, shallow crises and other periods have frequent, severe crises? And is there any way to reduce the frequency or amplitude of these cycles? Silence from Marx.
This strange, idolatrous determination to assume that every significant question must have an answer found in Marx or derived from Marx is really unfair to Marx, actually. He was brilliant but he was just one guy - who died 125 years ago! I suspect if Marx came back today the first thing he would want to do is learn all the stuff he missed after his death - Keynes, Veblen, Minsky, modern finance theory and growth theory, etc. (just talking about economics here). And once he discovered these things, the last thing he would want is for people to try pointlessly to cram all that stuff into the framework he set out in a bunch of books he had written in the 1850's and 1860's, racking their brains every day while reading the newspaper, trying to find a way to explain what's happening today through the lens of those now-ancient tomes. I mean, who does that? When data come in from the Hubble telescope, do physicists spend their time tying themselves into knots to demonstrate how the formulations laid out in Newton's Principia could be interpreted in such a way as to "explain" the data? What's the point?
SA