[Marxism] 'Crisis' [was Gindin-Brenner debate]

[Patrick Bond]

Aside from data, where Bob has terrific material to use against
Leo/Sam/Martin in the David Coates book Approaches to Capitalism, I
think there's a bit of a semantic problem here.

If you take away 'catastrophism' or 'breakdown' or other red-flag words
about economic crisis, how about considering Robert Cox's definition,
from his Production, Power and World Order (1987): ‘the economy must
undergo some structural change in order to emerge from a crisis; in a
cyclical downturn, the same structure contains the seeds of its own
revival’.

In other words, if you need something like a countervailing logic - in
my view, destruction of overaccumulated capital (on a much greater scale
than simple obsolescence or wear-and-tear) - to get a capitalist system
out of its stagnation, then you have a crisis. A recession is just a
regular business cycle.

And then we can talk about matters such as crisis displacement (not
resolution), via relative/absolute s.v. extraction, and spatial,
temporal and accumulation by dispossession strategies.

But if Cox's use of the word makes sense, then why not describe the
period since the early 1970s as a crisis, insofar as sustained and
extreme forms of (combined/uneven) devalorisation have visited many
parts of the world, in ways that they didn't - within economic logic -
during the prior decades...

Cheers,
Patrick

Robert Brenner wrote:
> Dear Louis,
>
> Thanks for your note. 
>
> When I first read your comments, having virtually no memory of this article
> --senility fast overtaking me--I thought, well, you may very well have a
> point, indeed more than one point.   
>
> I would have been a bit embarrassed, but not really surprised, if I had used
> the term crisis carelessly at that moment and even, unintentionally, left
> myself open for a catastrophist interpretation. 
>
>