By Anselm Jappe
“But what if this financialization , far from ruining the real economy, had on the contrary, helped it to survive beyond its expiry date? If it had breathed life into a dying corpse? Why is one sure that capitalism itself could be exempt from the cycle of birth, growth and death? Could it not contain intrinsic limits to its development, limits which do not only lie in the existence of a declared enemy (the proletariat, oppressed peoples) but in the depletion of natural resources? (…)
Although there won’t be a ‘Black Friday’ like in 1929, a ‘day of judgment’- there are good reasons to think that we are living through the end of a long historical period. The epoch when productive activity and its products do not serve to satisfy needs, but feed the unceasing cycle of work which valorises capital and of capital which employs work. The commodity and work, money and statist regulation, competition and the market: behind the financial crises which have reoccurred during the last twenty years, each time worse, looms the crisis of all categories, which, it is worth recalling, are not part always and everywhere of human existence. These categories have taken hold of human life during the last few centuries, and they will be able to evolve towards something else: for better or even worse still. But it is not the kind of decision that one adopts at a G8.”
Read it full at www.principiadialectica.co.uk
