Summary

From the introduction by George Caffentzis:

Since the 1997 " Asian Financial Crisis" there has been a continual drum roll of domestic currency devaluation, banking system collapses, stock market bubble burstings, and classical defined recession that moved from the periphery to the heart of the capitalist system. At the touch of this dark wand of crisis all the Brave New Economy talk of the 1990s which projected infinite, conflict-free increases of profit and wages due to high tech advances and international trade vaporized. A new somber tone has taken over the ideological high ground. If Michael Rothschild's "The Coming Productivity Surge" was typical of the New Economy literature of the mid-1990s, then Niall Ferguson's The Cash Nexus is typical of the current age of crisis (Rothschild 1993) (Ferguson 2001). Instead of computers and biotech, Ferguson argues that only blood and guns will do in this period. He concludes: Far from retreating like some giant snail behind an electronic shell, the United States should be devoting a larger percentage of its vast resources to making the world safe for capitalism and democracy. This book has tried to show that, like free trade, these are not naturally occurring, but require strong institutional foundations of law and order. The proper role of an imperial America is to establish these institutions where they are lacking, in necessary -- as in Germany and Japan in 1945--by military force (Ferguson 2001: 418). This simultaneous loss of confidence and trumpeting of the violent foundation of capitalism, is inevitably calling forth a critique of economics that will be provided by Marxists and other anti-capitalist who, just a decade ago, had been dismissed to history's ample dust bin. This revival of Marxism will proved an occasion for reviewing the classical (and no so classical) Marxist theories of crisis from the falling-rate-of-profit to the under-consumptionist version. I am looking forward to this revival of Marxist theory and the review of basic principles and texts that it will invite. But the following essay is not a contribution to a revival of the classical debates on crisis theory for two reasons. First, the essay was originally drafted in the Winter of 1994 after spending January in Mexico following the outbreak and development of the Zapatista revolution. A revised version of the essay was published in 1995 in Italian and later in 1999 in English.

The version that follows is from Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Giovanna Dalla Costa (eds.), Women, Development, and Labor of Reproduction: Struggles and Movements (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999). Consequently, its inspiration arises from developments that antedate the post-1997 crises of capitalism. Second, my essay takes classical Marxist crisis theory to task for defining crisis in such a narrow way that even bourgeois economics has transcended it."

(https://files.libcom.org/files/4_caffentzis05.pdf)

2. From the reading notes of Michel Bauwens, 2006:

George Caffentzis on the Crisis of Social Reproduction

Summary

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