Economic crisis

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani approaches economic crisis starting from the overproduction crisis of the 1930s, which he takes as a model for reading the present. With Clouscard, he shows that capital responds to it by creating new markets, the child, the woman, the young, promoted by the ideology of desire1. He dates the current crisis to the early 1970s, with financialisation and the end of the gold exchange standard in 1971. In his view, ecological distress and collapsologist discourse displace onto nature a misfortune whose cause is this crisis. They express the unhappy consciousness of middle classes threatened by the arrival of new consumers23. During the lockdown, he argues that the epidemic masks a crisis prepared since 2008 and close to that of 1929. He then rereads the afterword to Capital, where Marx announces the general crisis4. In 2022, he links crisis to war: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall leaves capitalism no way out but war. The United States, moreover, only emerged from the crisis of the 1930s through war5.

1. 1Radio Galère - Michel Clouscard - 27 Jul 2012
2. 2Y comme Yonville8 Jan 2015
3. 3Dominique Pagani : « Ce qui menace les sociétés, ce sont les hommes et femmes bénéficiaires de l’exploitation des autres »12 Mar 2019
4. 4#7 • Les Attelé(e)s de la confinitude5 May 2020
5. 5#8 Philosopher sous la menace27 Jan 2022

Introduction produced automatically from the 7 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.