Who are 'some Marxists' who talked of a 'collapse of capitalism'? Names and addresses, please, comrade. A far worse fate than being Chicken Little (i.e. people like me predicting periodic 'crises' - not collapses, by the way) is the cynical post-Marxist anti-Grossmanite strain, would you not agree?
> I can't see that the current economic problems are comparable to the crises of 1933, or even 1972 or 1983.
Then you should pass those eyes of yours over some charts by Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O'Rourke - http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3421 - for they show how this one gathered, over its first year, far more downside momentum than did the 1929-30 crash, in all economic categories, thus requiring your taxes to bail out your banks with more speed (and less resistance) than the US and UK Treasuries managed 70 years ago.
But going blind to that crash-plus-world-historic-rip-off may, at least, make you feel better?
> Crisis, surely, is that point at which "economic" changes can no longer be contained
There are all manner of definitions. My favourite is Robert Cox's in which he posits that a crisis is a system's disequilibrium to the extent that a solution cannot be established through the internal laws of motion of the system, and thus requires some kind of intervention from outside that system. If accumulation is the system, then either the disequilibrium is 'solved' through a massive crash and creative destruction, as in 1929-45, or the crisis is 'displaced': managed through spatial fixes (moving it around), temporal fixes (using credit to delay the problem), or 'accumulation by dispossession' (looting in extra-economic ways). There are limits to each, as everyone learned two years ago.
> and lead to widespread social disorder. I can see some negative effects, but no crisis. Where is the evidence of social collapse? Why is the economy expanding, not shrinking?
>
James, take your lame definitions and feel better, then. I thought you were once devoted to Das K?
Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Sep 1, 2010, at 12:13 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
>
>
>> There was much confusion in the ranks of some Marxists (names available upon request) who believed that a revival of superficial profitability (failing to discount financial fluff) from the mid-1980s through 2007 meant there was no 'crisis' in the Marxian sense. Phew, did they get that wrong.
>>
>
> If that was a crisis and this is a crisis, then the word has lost all its meaning.
>
See above for at least one coherent 'meaning', even if you don't like it, Doug. The point is that the 1970s witnessed a 'crisis' (yes?) and the reaction was what we might call displacement, via those shifting-stalling-stealing routines (above). Some, like yourself and a couple of wonderful Toronto comrades, seem to think that the recent crisis had nothing to do with the 1970s crisis, because that crisis was 'resolved' - through higher profits drawn from higher rates of exploitation. But the evidence suggests this crisis has been brewing quite a long time (look at that steady rise in every fictitious capital ratio), and it is at least a sign of the times that next year's Socialist Register talks of the crisis 'continuing', in a way James and you may object to. Sorry about that, comrades!
Patrick (heading to the US, this weekend by the way, to start my sabbatical in Berkeley and finally get a fast internet connection)