[DEBATE] : "Buy gold" (was From world commodity boom to bust)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 11:11 AM, Patrick Bond <pbond at mail.ngo.za> wrote:
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>>
>> If "the bubble" is a permanent feature of economic life, with only the
>> details changing every now & then, what does that mean? Does it mean that
>> everything is eventually about to break (though the break seems perpetually
>> deferred) after they run out of markets, like some game of musical chairs?
>> Or does it just mean that speculation and crash are just part of ordinary
>> capitalism?
>
> Hi comrade Doug,
>
> The bubble keeps growing, sure... *because* the various forces at work
> within global capitalism have prevented a full-fledged meltdown. The
> techniques of crisis management have combined temporal (the bubble growing
> so it gets worse over time), and spatial (moving the bubble around,
> geographically and sectorally). In the context of overaccumulation, there is
> no "ordinary capitalism" - the "crisis" means that the ordinary systems of
> self-correction (little business cycles) no longer work to devalorise
> sufficient overaccumulated capital.

What's the definition of crisis?  Both labor and capital letting the
system "correct itself" . . . all the way down.  If either or both
prevent it, the system, if not all workers and capitalists, is saved,
which may be the definition of business cycle.

Yoshie