Much like comparing Jim D.'s sense of humour with Howard Stern's, Jim's characterization of SSA theory may be largely accurate but still unfair. There is ample evidence of ideological and theoretical drift on the part of many of the SSA framework's original proponents. (Sam Bowles is a one-man crisis of Marxism [I don't know where this description fits on the Jim Devine - Howard Stern scale of high praise - condemnation].) The unfairness arises because unfortunately much the same can be said for any school of Marxist thought in the current period as the recently discussed history of Regulation theory demonstrates (to take another instance Marxist feminism has recently degenerated into individual agency theory cf. Folbre and McCrate [hi! if you're out there]). Thus most frameworks of thought will have more Marxist and less Marxist practitioners with the more Marxist disproportionately concentrated in the past. (Fundamental [not a term of abuse] Marxism is relatively immune to this as to depart from the fundamentals over time is to be separated from the fold.) It is to uncritically accept the notion of progress with time to regard the latest statement of a framework as necessarily that which is most true to its theoretical essence. I think Stavros M.'s working out of the implications of a theory's innovations over time to be a useful Marxist methodology but it gives a onesided picture in a period of overall ideological retrenchment. (In any case, the work which Kotz, myself and Reich did in the first section of _SSAs_ , CUP, 1994 postdates Beyond the Wasteland.) To Eric N.s specific points. Eric is correct to say that capitalists do not necessarily desire stability. It is one of the classic contradictions of capitalism that competitive strategies pursued by individual capitalists may create economy-wide and society-wide instability. It is also true that economic instability is not even necessarily inconsistent with overall growth - the US economy from 1875 to 1895 is a case in point. The point is only that such instability when extended over time tends to create a period of crisis for a capitalist social formation either because it is incompatible with growth (likely if not necessarily so) or for other reasons. Since capitalism tends toward instability (through class struggle and capitalist competition), these forces must be suppressed, moderated and channelled if surplus extraction is not to be threatened. This can be done, short of reorganizing the mode of extraction of surplus value, through class struggle at the level of the institutions of coercion and consent - the state and ideology. Thus politics and ideology are at the heart of a Marxist analysis of capitalist dynamics over time and do not exist at a lower intermediate level of analysis. Eric is right that class struggle changes institutions all the time (but not in a continuous incremental way!) and therefor too much has been made of the opportunities in a crisis period. The basic point however is the opportunities in a crisis period are DIFFERENT from those in a period of stability and you must know what kind of period you are in. One of the problems is that at the current time the answer to this question is unclear. Knowing the answer to this would throw light on the questions surrounding the French strikes for instance. I must read Eric's article. Terry McDonough
