Hey, was VERY disappointed that they stopped the collapse by destroying Ivan H's future! You too, no doubt.
> The state is outside the system?
>
No, you didn't get the point (the state is the exco of the Bourgeoisie, responsible for maintaining profitability through regime maintenance, including bailouts). The point is that the 'system's' internal drive is to accumulate at all costs, and the kinds of creative destruction that are needed to 'fix' a capitalist system in crisis were avoided, so far, through shifting-stalling-stealing in the 1970s-2000s, and then more recently, via a blatant bailout to save a huge financial devalorisation (1/2 the world's stock market 'value' up in smoke) from generalising into a payments freeze, as had happened in the 1930s.
>> 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,
>>
>
> That's just not true.
>
> <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Gloomy.html>
>
Ok, I retract (sort of, but see immediately below). But it is true for those otherwise brilliant SR comrades. (In 2003-04 when I spent a year in Toronto, they banned the word 'crisis' from seminars I took part in... in a friendly way, of course.)
> it's wrong to call 1982-2007 a long crisis, because capital restructured itself
It just made the underlying tendencies to overaccumulation worse, through shifting-stalling-stealing... that's not 'restructuring' if by that you mean it 'solved' its earlier crisis tendencies. They were still there, just displaced until it hit, bigger and harder, later...
> very dynamically and subdued its political challenges. Unless, like Jim O'Connor, you think that capitalism has been in crisis for 700 years (as he once told me).
>
No, I already said that the earlier 1929-45 crisis was solved. Through creative destruction.