Does it further the discussion - or the cause - to blame what Meszaros
calls the personifications of capital, when the present crisis is at
least cyclical and, again according to Meszaros, it is by this juncture
more probably structural? Here is Meszaros's list of conditions pointing
toward structural crisis (Beyond Capital, p. 692), bearing in mind that
this was written at least fourteen years ago, a few years after the
implosion/collapse/destruction of the Soviet 'postcapitalist' system,
which may or may not have any bearing on its continuing relevance,
further, that to me astoundingly, no extensive appraisal of this
975-page work which Daniel Singer described as 'magisterial' and Daniel
Lebowitz and Hugo Chavez recommend to all has ever appeared on the
internet or anywhere else, from my search of the indexes of the major
left journals, and that he has a new complementing book coming out in
August (The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time
<http://www.monthlyreview.org/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=PB1696&Category_Code=POL>):
1. The internal social/economic contradictions of 'advanced' capital
manifesting in increasingly more lopsided development under the direct
or indirect control of the 'military-industrial complex' and the system
of transational corporations;
2. The social, economic and political contradictions of postcapitalist
society, both internally and in relation to one another, leading to
their disintegration and thereby to the intensification of the
structural crisis of the global capital system;
3. The increasing rivalries, tensions and contradictions among the
leading capitalist countries, both within the various regional systems
and among them, putting enormous strain on the established institutional
framework (from the European Community to the International Monetary
System) and foreshadowing the spectre of a devastating trade war;
4. The growing difficulties of maintaining the established postcolonial
system of domination (from Iran to Africa and from South East Asia to
Central and Southern America), coupled with the contradictions generated
within the 'metropolitan countries through the production units
established and managed by 'expatriate' capital.
As we can see. in all four categories - each of which stands for a
multiplicity of contradictions - the tendency is the intensification,
and not the decrease of the existing antagonisms. Furthermore, the
severity of the crisis is underlined by effectively confining the
intervention to the sphere of effects, making it prohibitively difficult
to tackle their causes, thanks to the earlier mentioned 'circularity' of
capital's civil society/political state through which the established
power relations tend to reproduce themselves in all their surface
transformations.
Cordially,
Ralph Johansen
Doug Henwood wrote:
On Apr 10, 2008, at 11:20 AM, Perelman, Michael wrote:
Both Greenspan and Bush were
active be regulators.
Michael, that voice recognition software needs some tuning!
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