Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, who I have an awful lot of respect for, have just put out a little essay: “From global finance to the nationalisation of the banks: eight theses on the economic crisis”. Quite a few wildly different schools of thought on the crisis have emerged in radical circles, so breaking the argument down into eight discrete points is really helpful for focusing debate. In particular, this will attract flak from certain circles: “Even though the spheres of capitalist finance and production are obviously intertwined (in significant ways today more than ever before), the origins of today’s US-based financial crisis are not rooted in a profitability crisis in the sphere of production, as was the case with the crisis of the 1970s, nor in the global trade imbalances that have emerged since.”
As it happens I’m pretty much behind the Panitch and Gindin school. I’ll post the points here as a spark for discussion, but go check out the whole document.
1. The current economic crisis has to be understood in terms of the historical dynamics and contradictions of capitalist finance in the second half of the 20th century.
2. The spatial expansion and social deepening of capitalism in the last quarter century could not have occurred without innovations in finance.
3. The competitive volatility of global finance produced a series of financial crises whose containment required repeated state intervention.
4. Both finance’s central role in the making of global capitalism and the American state’s role in sustaining it produced the bubble that emerged inside the US housing sector.
5. The inevitable bursting of the housing bubble had such a profound impact because of its centrality to sustaining both US consumer demand and global financial markets.
6. The crisis reinforced the centrality of the American state in the global capitalist economy while multiplying the difficulties entailed in managing it.
7. The scale of the crisis today is such that nationalization of the financial system cannot be kept off the political agenda.
8. The call for nationalization of the banks provides an opening for advancing broader strategies that begin to take up the need for systemic alternatives to capitalism.