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The capitalist crisis and the return of history |
By David North 26 March 2009
David North spoke last week at San Diego State University (March 19) and University of California, Berkeley (March 22) on “The Capitalist Crisis and the Return of History.” We publish here the notes upon which his lectures were based.
1. It is acknowledged by serious bourgeois economists that the global economic crisis—the worst since the 1930s—has dealt a devastating blow to the international legitimacy of the capitalist system. The free-market nostrums that have been exalted as unchallengeable truths by politicians, media talking heads and many academic economists for nearly three decades have been discredited, intellectually and morally. There is growing apprehension about the future that awaits the capitalist system. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times wrote on March 8:
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Why the U.S. Stimulus Package is Bound To Fail |
by David Harvey
Much is to be gained by viewing the contemporary crisis as a surface eruption generated out of deep tectonic shifts in the spatio-temporal disposition of capitalist development. The tectonic plates are now accelerating their motion and the likelihood of more frequent and more violent crises of the sort that have been occurring since 1980 or so will almost certainly increase. The manner, form, spatiality and time of these surface disruptions are almost impossible to predict, but that they will occur with greater frequency and depth is almost certain. The events of 2008 have therefore to be situated in the context of a deeper pattern. Since these stresses are internal to the capitalist dynamic (which does not preclude some seemingly external disruptive event like a catastrophic pandemic also occurring), then what better argument could there be, as Marx once put it, “for capitalism to be gone and to make way for some alternative and more rational mode of production.”
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Their crisis, our challenge |
by David Harvey
In a far reaching interview with Red Pepper, David Harvey argues that the current financial crisis and bank bail-outs could lead to a massive consolidation of the banking system and a return to capitalist ``business as usual'' -– unless there is sustained revolt and pressure for a dramatic redistribution and socialisation of wealth. David Harvey was interviewed by Marco Berlinguer and Hilary Wainwright. Transcribed by Kate Ferguson. This article first appeared in the April/May 2009 print edition of Red Pepper. It is posted in the interests of furthering left debate on how best to respond to the crisis.
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The Economic Crisis in Historical Perspective |
By Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello and Brendan Smith
Source: Labor Strategies Jeremy Brecher's ZSpace Page
Today's Economic Crisis in Historical Perspective
The superlatives of the global economic meltdown of 2008 are, well, superlative. Professor Noriel Roubini of New York University says the current crisis is "the largest leveraged asset bubble and credit bubble in history." The International Monetary Fund says, "In advanced economies, output is forecast to contract on a full-year basis in 2009, the first such fall in the post-war period."
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The World Crisis of Capitalist Globalization and its Impact on China
John Bellamy Foster
In referring in my title here to “A Failed System” I do not of course mean that capitalism as a system is in any sense at an end. Rather I mean by “failed system” a global economic and social order that increasingly exhibits a fatal contradiction between reality and reason—to the point, in our time, where it threatens not only human welfare but also the continuation of most sentient forms of life on the planet. Three critical contradictions make up the contemporary world crisis emanating from capitalist development: (1) the current Great Financial Crisis and stagnation/depression; (2) the growing threat of planetary ecological collapse; and (3) the emergence of global imperial instability associated with shifting world hegemony and the struggle for resources. Such structural weaknesses of the system, as Joseph Schumpeter might have said, are the product of capitalism’s past successes, but they raise catastrophic problems and failures in the present nonetheless.1 How we choose to act today in response to this failed system is therefore the most critical question that humanity has ever faced.
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