While fidelity to the gospel should not be the measure of
the truth of any statement regarding crisis, I too find
the notion of permanent crisis to be somewhat ridiculous.
There's the Luxemburg variety, which asserts that capitalism
survives only by dumping unrealized surplus on regions
external to the zone governed by the law of value. When the
East Bloc was formed and many Third World states attempted
to go the "third way," it was prophesied that capitalism
would automatically crumble. When this didn't happen, then
there was a shift to the Keynesian-state-eats-the-surplus
theory. Now the Keynesian state is dead, and capitalism is
still around, though hardly healthy. I think this should serve
as an occasion to do away with any lingering "mechanistic"
theories of capitalist crisis. Capitalism restructures itself
_through_ crisis by devaluing values and by displacing costs
onto features of the social totality external to the circuit
of capital. This means that people starve and the environment
is despoiled. Starving people and a ruined environment don't
necessarily throw the system into crisis unless they make it
so (I conceive of "nature" here as an active force which can
tolerate only certain degrees of abuse). If capitalism sows
its own seeds of final destruction, IMHO, it is only through
destroying those fictitious commodities which capital must
have access to if is to produce value at all, not through the
inner workings of the law of value itself.
--John Gulick
Sociology Graduate Program
UC-Santa Cruz
(Research focus: eco-Marxist sociology
of the built environment)
email:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
