Glad to see some debate getting under way on this list.  In response 
to Julian Wells' comments:

1)  The idea of a 'solely' financial crisis makes no sense, surely, 
at least in a 'classical' Marxian (as opposed to a sort of 
Keyneso-Marxian) analysis.  Marx himself, it seems to me, is pretty 
clear that 

(a) the *potential* for crisis is rooted in the exchange of 
commodities, which itself historically gives rise to money;  

(b) that the crisis under a fully-developed (monetised) capitalist 
economy always *appears* first in the form of a financial crisis, 
when breaks in the chain of credit lead to a rush into the money 
commodity; 

(c) the underlying *cause* of crisis in such economies is the 
inability of the capitalist class to complete a significant 
proportion of the myriad circuits of capitalist production, 
M-C...P...C'-M';   

(d)  such a breakdown may originate in problems in the conditions of 
circulation (M-C, C'-M'), or in the conditions of production 
(C...P...C');  and

(e) these problems in turn can be traced to the contradictions of 
class rule, that is, the contradictions between the private 
ownership of the means of production and the social character of 
production and exchange.

While all of that sounds very abstract, it does encompass one very 
important argument (among others), namely that no capitalist crisis 
can be seen as simply or solely speculative.  The political 
consequence of seeing financial crises as 'speculative' is to 
encourage the idea that somehow if only 'productive' capital was 'in 
charge', there wouldn't be so much nasty 'financial speculation';  to 
which the answer is, that the deepening and widening of financial 
intermediation is always an intrinsic consequence of attempts to 
extend and expand capitalist production.

2)  As to globalization:  there has been a great deal of debate on 
the political response of the left to the apparent deepening of 
cross-border integration.  There is a piece on this by Jonathan Moran 
in the latest Capital and Class;  the forthcoming (very soon) 1999 
issue of "Socialist Register" has a good proportion devoted to the 
topic (including, incidentally, a paper by me).  Trade unions and all 
kinds of NGO have been actively developing an internationalist 
political practice in the last few years, not least in the struggle 
against the OECD's Multilateral Agreement on Investment, and in 
solidarity campaigns around dockworkers, the Zapatistas, genetic 
engineering, and many other issues.  This seems to me to be the only 
way forward - a decisive break with the whole business of 
-international competitiveness', to be replaced by the conscious 
regulation of cross-border exchanges and of the global commons.

PS Can this email list be set up so that you can respond straight to 
the list with the 'reply' command?


Hugo Radice
Division of Industrial and Labour Studies,
Leeds University Business School,
University of Leeds,
Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.
tel: 44-113-233-4507; fax 44-113-233-2640
email: [log in to unmask]


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