he cause for the current misery is not to be sought in the huge over-valuation of financial markets; the latter was itself not a cause but an effect, a mechanism aimed at avoiding the real, underlying crisis with which capitalist society has been confronted ever since the 1970s.

Capitalist crisis in its classical form gives way to an even more fundamental crisis in which the viability of labor itself comes to the fore.

The real insanity of the capitalist mode of production is expressed in the contradiction between the enormous advance in productivity brought about by the "micro-electronic revolution" and the fact that that advance has not even come close to guaranteeing the possibility of a good life for all.

to read the article "Crash Course" published on November 14, 2008, click on

http://www.krisis.org/2008/crash-course