Stanley Aronowitz teaches at the City University of New York and is the author of Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future (2006). More important articles and videos are available at www.socialistproject.ca.
"Since 2002 the emerging recessionary signs were assiduously ignored by all virtually mainstream quarters. Fall 2006 witnessed the beginning of sagging economic growth..
According to the conventional wisdom, the US economy was `post-industrial'-well on the way to realizing the prognostication that ours was a service economy and it was better to let others like the Chinese and Koreans produce material goods because industrial production caused pollution..
So what if the past thirty years were times of wage stagnation and decline, we had perfected a magnificent credit system (the main spur to consumption) that seemed to know no limits.
The bare truth is that what has been taken as economic expansion since the early 1970s was a symptom that the United States (and the UK and other European countries) have survived a genuine period of economic decline by means of a dramatic increase in the creation of huge amounts of fictitious capital. Fictitious capital is money that has no material basis, but is a speculation on future economic performance. Fictitious capital is an ordinary function of the credit system.."
to read Stanley Aronowitz' article "Facing the Economic Crisis" published Dec 26, 2008, visit
http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet170.html
Original: Facing the Economic Crisis