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so let's see: the nationalization of fannie mae and freddie mac, the nationalization of aig, the failure of lehmann brothers, the collapse of washington mutual, the buy=out of wachovia's banking operations, the near-collapse of several banks in england...definitely business as usual.
a steady tracking-down of home values, an acceleration of mortgage defaults, a destabilization of the entire system of debt generation and circulation...
a reactive bush administration whose neoliberal ideology prevents it from being able to even imagine how to address systemic problems...
china stops lending to the united states---the federal reserve stretched to its limits by the ad hoc decision to take over aig after pressure comes from most of the metropole to act...
the entire american model of capitalism, articulated in earnest since the 1980s, resting on the mutations in capitalist organization begun (@the level of structural alteration) in the early 1970s...the entire ideology for which it stands, which has rationalized it, justified it,,,,the cultural context in which that ideology has long since been blurred into the lingua franca of infotainment transfer..all of it faces a situation that it outside its short-term tiny brain logic.
i don't see this as a Crisis in the sense that dialectical materialism once forecast, the development of "objective contradiction" to the point of explosion, as a result of which Revolution would follow as the Working Class recognized it's "Objective Interests" (with the help of a cadre of professional revolutionaries of course)...but this sure as hell is a Problem and cannot in any coherent way be integrated into the terminologies that are used to describe the ordinary fluctuations with a bidness cycle of x-duration (take your pick---if you create a cycle long enough, everything seems normal)....
the real problems that make this something Outside the normal run of cycle=unfolding is the political dimension of it.
to my mind, what we're starting to see is the consequences of the bush administration policies, which are the most advanced expression of the interior logic of neoliberalism understood from the self-blinding viewpoint of "the hegemon."
while it is possible that the outcome of this may more or less resemble the situation that preceded this, it is increasingly unlikely that will be the case. it'd take some thinking to do it, not reacting to some Crisis Mode which is primarily about setting up an Imaginary Clock that ticks ticks ticks our collective way to one or another version of armageddeon.
when this type of scenario has unfolded---and it has repeatedly---in the southern hemisphere in the context of "trade liberalization" or "integration into the global economy" what stabilized it was the neoliberal "Plan" that we quaintly refer to as "structural adjustment"---this is the same kind of crisis, the same kind of scenario of governing from crisis--but without the overarching institution with the Plan--no matter how brutal (and the imf sap programs were are remain brutal--but in the american media bubble, you don't see it. not enough room for that kind of thing when there's so much in the way of sports to be shown, for example)....when this crisis hits the metropole--the powers that run the institutions that have the Plan, the powers which are the Interests that shape the Plan---then there is no plan.
that's a crisis.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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