[lbo-talk] Austerity In The Face Of Weakness

c b cb31450 at gmail.com
Fri Sep 3 07:19:12 PDT 2010


Patrick Bond

Yes, my crisis clock stops and starts lots more than yours, Doug. If you've lived in NYC, you didn't notice too much 'crisis', did you, just in the mid-1970s, early 1980s, early 1990s, early 2000s and 2007-09. In the last two cases, NYC's paper factories burned up $7-$14 trillion each (ok, it was other people's money so probably you still didn't notice).

For the rest of living elsewhere, the crisis has been coming in much deeper and longer waves (the first article below has a list of extreme devaluations). Here in Southern Africa where I've spent the last 20 years, crisis has been rather persistent.

^^^^^ CB: Hello, Patrick. Since you are going to be at Berkeley, perhaps you will visit us in Detroit again sometime soon.

Also perhaps, you would want to substitute the word "immiseration" for "crisis" in this discussion. The definition of "crisis" would tend to refer to something that is periodic. Marx's Absolute Law of Capitalist Accumulation seems to describe immiseration as a "secular" trend, in economists' parlance ( I think). Immiseration is a continuous result of capitalist accumulation. Also, immiseration seems to get concentrated and fixed geographically, as in South Africa or Maputo or Detroit or in "inner cities" in the US; as you say, not in Lower Manhattan or western Connecticut.

Immiseration has been rather persistent in South Africa and Detroit.



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