On the Notion of a Crisis of Social Reproduction: a Theoretical Review

Since the 1997 " Asian Financial Crisis" there has been a continual drum roll of domestic currency devaluation, banking system collapses, stock market bubble burstings, and classical defined recession that moved from the periphery to the heart of the capitalist system. At the touch of this dark wand of crisis all the Brave New Economy talk of the 1990s which projected infinite, conflict-free increases of profit and wages due to high tech advances and international trade vaporized. A new somber tone has taken over the ideological high ground. If Michael Rothschild's "The Coming Productivity Surge" was typical of the New Economy literature of the mid-1990s, then Niall Ferguson's The Cash Nexus is typical of the current age of crisis (Rothschild 1993) (Ferguson 2001). Instead of computers and biotech, Ferguson argues that only blood and guns will do in this period. He concludes: