Doug has shown that he has limited forward vision and in his cynical way, he also likes throwing cold water on Marxian crisis theory. For someone we all love to learn from on so many topics (and I remain one of his biggest fans), and for someone editing a Left Business Observer, these are unfortunate flaws. Not to sound too presumptious, but they can be remedied, with the right attitude. (I thought the wake-up call of September 2008 would have helped, but no.)
> It is that they say the spells are
> _episodic_ , not continuous.
Of course. NO ONE says that capitalism is in continuous crisis. That's why Marxists sometimes use the idea of a Golden Age of post-war prosperity. But the idea of crisis displacement refers to specific economic management techniques - shifting, stalling, stealing - that are always available, to be sure, but that have been much more decisively deployed since the 1970s, since the current crisis formally began in the advanced capitalist economies.
> There are busts and _booms_. The booms
> are not "disequilibriums" for the capitalists. There is immiseration
> of masses during even the booms. That's the absolute general law of
> capitalist accumulation.
>
Agreed. We're talking instead about the busts. Those are moments when you get either New Deals or fascist responses. Job One is to know what they are, where they come from, and the limits of system-management strategies.
That's where this conversation has been, and still goes. I was going to give up and drop it but it seems like there are still denialists, and if I'm not making my points clearly, then I need to work harder, I suppose.
Cheers, Patrick