Oct 17, 2008

More from Bring The Ruckus!

1) More Discussion on the Crisis and the Three Way Fight: 3 Responses

An example of a “state capitalist” ruling class perspective, & what is a “liberal” capitalist program?

comments by Nick Paretsky.

There’s analysis and commentary all over the internet on the pending nationalization of the banking system throughout the advanced capitalist world; here’s a little more.

2) Capitalism Hits the Fan

Richard Wolff a professor of economics at UMass Amherst talks on the current "financial" crisis and capitialism in general. A form of socialism is presented as a possible alternative. This talk was presented by the Asociation for Economic and Social Analysis and the journal Rethinking Marxism

3) “MUST THE MOLECULES FEAR AS THE ENGINE DIES?” * NOTES ON THE WALL STREET “MELTDOWN”

Dear Midnight Notes Friends,

The breakdown of the Wall Street financial machine makes the task
that we outlined in our June meeting more urgent. In June we planned
to rethink Midnight Notes in view of the restructuring of the
accumulation process and class relations carried out through the
neoliberal turn and Structural Adjustment. We can now define this
project more precisely: what do the current crisis and restructuring
of the financial system imply for us as we join the rest of the world
in the dog house of structural adjustment in the twilight of the
American empire?

In response to these questions, it is important, first, that we
realize that the so-called Wall Street “meltdown” is certainly the
end, but also the completion of the neoliberal program. Let us be
clear about it. To think otherwise is to ignore the lesson taught to
us by the event that opened the present capitalist era: the 1973 coup
again the Chilean working class experiment with socialism, that led
to the victory of strong state backed market economy. Karl Polanyi’s
theory that the single most important cause of the rise of fascism
and Nazism in Europe was the inability to control the financial
market after the 1929 crash also resonates here. In other words, we
should not read the restructuring taking place as a turn to

4) Finance Capitalist George Soros Debates Marx, the End of Capitalism, and Human Subjectivity

The entire program can be found here:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10102008/watch.html

BILL MOYERS:Welcome to the Journal.

You are not alone if you are worried about the financial melt down. So is my guest George Soros, one of the world's best known and successful investors, making billions in times of boom or bust. He's been warning for years of a financial melt down fueled by easy credit and sleepy regulation. Now he's out with this timely book, "The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means....."

....BILL MOYERS:Let's imagine for a moment that we're not in a New York studio but we are in Neely's Barbecue Stand in Marshall, Texas, my hometown, and we're surrounded by people I know, people who have lost half of their 401(k)s in the last three or four weeks, and what they want to know is does this financial meltdown represent the end of the American dream as they have known it.

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