Propositions for an Analysis of the Crisis

In current usage, the term always designates a situation marked by a break with a of functioning considered normal. The existence of the current economic can be denied in various ways: it can be made a ' 'normal phase in a cyclic process, or it can be made a succession of short cycles of greater amplitude than normal; or, quite simply, one may remain within short-term analysis based on the same macroeconomic models, though noting an unexpected gap between forecasts and reality. To understand the nature and the evolution of a crisis, and to envisage economic policies meeting the challenge a poses, it is more effective to consider it for what it is, a break in the structural stability of the process of accumulation. In this way it is acknowledged that the current is not the first in the history of industrial capitalism: suffice it to mention the great depression of the last quarter of the 19th century and the great crisis of the period between the two world wars.1 The present is part of this history. It is of the same nature as the preceding crisis: it testifies to the depletion of the profit capacities of one mode of regulation2 and it can be the beginning of the reconstitution of new profit capacities within a new of regulation. But at the same time it has specific characteristics deriving from the fact that it has occurred at a specific moment in the history of the structures of capital. It is a of a particular of regulation, namely, that which had functioned since the New Deal and the end of World War II.