Rethinking Crisis

Abstract

In their April 2002 Review of the Month, Monthly Review's editors present a particularly clear statement of the view that the American economy, and with it global capitalism, has been stagnating since the early seventies and is now facing the threat of a financial crisis. It is our view that by focusing on the fragility of American capitalism and searching for data that provide evidence of the next and deeper economic crisis, the left tends to downplay the significance of the continuing capacity of American capital and the American state to restructure the world "in its own image." The left has, all too often, still not come to terms with the reconstitution of the American Empire that followed the crisis of the early seventies. Absorbed with confirming how crisis-prone capitalism is (no doubt in the expectation that this will make it easier for us to mobilize opposition to the system), the left has paid too little attention to the question of the capacity of the state to contain crises.

This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.

Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.