Re: Capitalism and Collapse
On Aug 11, 2007, at 7:48 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
Doug, the ‘reproduction of a system’ was not really in doubt in
1929-32, but capitalist ‘crisis’ was not a bad description of those years, surely?Why not advance to the Robert Cox definition which - I’m nowhere
near my copy of Production Power and World Order - if I recall is that a
‘crisis’ sets in when the system’s natural self-corrective mechanisms no
longer work to stabilise or equilibrate the system, and problems get worse, hence requiring an external ’solution’ to (or at minimum displacement
of) the problem that is contrary to the system’s internal logic.So a major stock market ‘correction’ which devalorises vast sums
(was it $7 trillion for the dot.com ‘crisis’) would represent such a state.
I’m not sure that Cox’s definition is all that different from mine,
but in any case…yes it was about $7 trillion lost stock market
value between 2000 and 2002 (from $17.8 trillion to $9.4 trillion,
which brought nominal capitalization back to 1996 levels). And the
consequences of that “crisis” were…a few years of subpar employment
growth, and an unemployment rate than peaked at 6.3%. Henry Blodget
became a journalist and fiction writer, a few execs went to jail, and
Ken Lay made a premature exit. The consequences in the political and
cultural sphere approximated zero. Then we launched a housing mania.
Doug