World Capitalist Crisis & Prospects for a Radical Response

Presentation by Loren Goldner, to be followed by discussion:

That world capitalism is in a profound crisis is no secret, especially in hard-hit areas such as California. But a radical response requires an understanding of the deep, "epochal" causes of the crisis, beyond now-mainstream banter about financialization or sub-prime or Wall Street bailouts and bonuses. What has happened since 2008 is merely an acceleration of the "slow motion" crisis that has been with us in reality since the late 1960's/early 1970's. The crisis is global, and the response to it must ultimately be global.

Loren will give an overview of this decades-long crisis and its deepening in the past three years, and discuss what must be done to avoid the obvious capitalist "solutions" to it, which are much greater austerity and possibly a major war. He will talk about some attempts to organize against the crisis, such as in Greece or California or the recent strikes in China.

Loren Goldner is a writer based in New York. He lived in South Korea from 2005 to 2009 working on a book on the Korean working class. He is an editor of the new on-line journal Insurgent Notes (http://insurgentnotes.com).

Much of his work is available on the Break Their Haughty Power web site:
http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner

To have a more focused discussion, people attending might look at these recent articles by Goldner on the crisis:

"Global Leveraged Buyout or the 'Longest Boom in Capitalist History'" http://libcom.org/library/global-leveraged-buyout-or-longest-boom-capitalist-history-reply-robert-fitch

"The Biggest October Surprise of All: A World Capitalist Collapse" http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/october.html