Crisis theory

... The abandoning of the materialist basis leads inexorably from revolutionary socialism to reformism (Grossmann, 1970, p ... rise in the organic composi-tion of capital would lead to a falling rate of proJit ... only the variable part of capital that yields surplus-value, while the rate of profit ...

It is widely accepted that inequality has increased sharply recently in developed countries, but no consensus exists so far about the importance of inequality in the financial crisis of 2007-2009. The aim of this article is to outline and contrast the theoretical underpinnings of Marxian, post-Keynesian, and mainstream crisis theories, and to compare their viewpoints regarding the role that income inequality played in the crisis. The results of this review suggest that, despite important differences in their theoretical concepts, several economists of these three strands offer a similar explanation on why income inequality was an important contributing factor to the financial crisis.

This essay focuses on the role of toleration and tolerance in Liberalism.
The main part concentrates on the changing connections between toleration and historical Liberalism, in the background of the overall socio-historical situation. For this reason, it analyzes the actual faces of toleration, their vicissitudes, and their actual distance from the traditional project (presented in the Annex). On this ground, it makes a provisional assertion about the future of Liberalism.

Forthcoming in Critical Sociology: In the wake of the global financial crisis, societies across the world are attempting to manage potentially destabilizing levels of youth unemployment and underemployment. New terms have entered the popular lexicon such as ‘generation jobless’, ‘the new underclass’, and ‘the precariat’ in order to describe a generation of young people struggling to acquire secure livelihoods in the most dismal labor market since the Great Depression. This article draws on analytical resources from critical sociology of education and heterodox political economy in order to critique orthodox economic diagnoses of generational precarity as a human capital problem. It argues that while neo-Keynesian accounts provide an important corrective to certain aspects of conventional (neoclassical/neoliberal) viewpoints, they ultimately fall short of the explanatory power of Marxian analysis, particularly concerning the primacy of class relations and the contradictory role of employment within an increasingly crisis-ridden global capitalism.

This essay is part of a broader work in progress. Its goal is threefold: first to detect and analyze the rise of Spinoza's theory of toleration and present its logical structure and content (1); then to explore the many faces of toleration in our contemporary liberal societies (2),  and finally to examine how relevant is the theory of Spinoza to our own overall situation (3).

The critical theory of the Frankfurt School starts with an explanatory-diagnostic analysis of the social pathologies of the present followed by anticipatory-utopian reflection on possible treatments for these disorders. This approach draws extensively on parallels to medicine. I argue that the ideas of social pathology and crisis that pervade the methodological writings of the Frankfurt School help to explain critical theory's contention that the object of critique identifies itself when social institutions cease to function smoothly. However, in reflecting on the role that reason and self-awareness play in second stage of social criticism, I contend that this model is actually better conceptualized through the lens of the psychoanalyst than the physician. Although the first generation's explicit commitment to psychoanalysis has largely dissipated in recent critical theory, this faith in a rationalized "talking cure" leading to self-awareness of pathologies remains at the core of the Frankfurt School.

A re-reading and historical interpretation of Marx's “general law of accumulation”— the tendency for the expanded reproduction of capital to throw off more labour than it absorbs—in light of the growth of surplus populations and surplus capital in the world today.

Social and cultural anthropologists have made a unique, relevant and anti-normative contribution to the study of crises. By means of ethnographic fieldwork in specific settings, anthropologists have provided significant information on how social groups try to cope with critical situations in everyday life resorting to different strategies, forms of cooperation or political action. Simultaneously, anthropology has brought to light the role played by cognitive schemata and symbolic resources in making sense of crisis situations, turning them intelligible and developing possible resolutions. Anthropology has carried out important studies on how people experience time, give meaning to and produce plausible images of the future in crisis situations, when time freezes. The main theoretical contributions to the study of crises will be discussed, together with a number of empirical studies among which special attention will be paid to those carried out in Latin America, including my own research on the experiences and responses of the middle class during the 2001 Argentine crisis. Los antropólogos sociales y culturales han hecho una contribución única, relevante y anti-normativa a los estudios de crisis. Mediante el trabajo de campo etnográfico en escenarios específicos, los antropólogos han proporcionado información importante sobre cómo los grupos sociales tratan de hacer frente a situa-ciones críticas en la vida cotidiana por medio de diferentes estrategias, formas de cooperación o acción política. Al mismo tiempo, la antropología ha puesto de manifiesto el papel que desempeñan los esquemas cognitivos y los recursos simbólicos para dar sentido a las situaciones de crisis, tornándolas inteligibles y desarrollando posibles soluciones. La antropología ha llevado a cabo importantes estudios sobre cómo las personas experimentan el tiempo, dan sentido y producen imágenes del futuro plausibles en situaciones de crisis, cuando el tiempo se congela. Aquí se discutirán las principales contribuciones teóricas a los estudios de crisis, junto con una serie de investigaciones empíricas, entre las cuales se prestará especial atención a aquellas llevadas a cabo en América Latina, incluso mis propios estudios sobre las experiencias y las respuestas de la clase media durante la crisis argentina de 2001.

The purpose of my study is to examine how gender division was reflected in Swedish football supporter culture across the decades after World War Two. It also examines how masculinity was constructed
in this context and how supporters during this time perceived existing gender structures. The study contributes to the field by examining a yet unexamined period where other researchers focused on times before or after, with a focus on the connection between masculinity and violence. I
see a hypothetic connection to respectablility, having it’s glory days these same years. To answer these questions, I sought oral accounts from Malin Thor, Lars Hansson as well as Robert Perks and Alistair Thompson. In addition, in-depth interviews were conducted with six individuals who were active in the supporter culture of Malmö FF during these years. The theoretical foundation for my research and the understanding of my empiricism are gender- masculinity and crisis theories from Raewyn Connell, Rebecca Pearse and Michael A. Messner and popular science authors such as Marcus Priftis and Stephan Mendel-Elk. Raewyn Connell’s crisis theories were used to understand
the transformation of the Swedish terraces from the fifties to today. The results show that men and women were more separated before, physically and through perceptions of gender roles. During the
seventies, these social structures began to change. Violence became more relevant as an expression of masculinity for the men who used to feel secure in fixed gender roles and overt hierarchies. Sporting
arenas, work places and homes were all places segregated by gender and active agents in constructing gender roles. In these contexts, good character and restraint were central parts of masculinity.
At the same time, women were, at best, second-class supporters. Often, they were looked upon as girlfriends, wives or appendages to male supporters. When society rapidly began to change in its social structures during the seventies, a crisis in masculinity arose. This explains the more extreme form of verbal and physical expressions from men today. Today, far more women attend football games and play football compared to a few decades ago. Gender is not static but in constant change.
Social structure positions have shifted. Because of the fact that distance and differences between men and women have been reduced, it has become more important than ever to highlight these for certain groups of people.

This essay contains parts of a work in progress about toleration. Its goal is to analyze the relation of tolerance and toleration with morals and ethics. So, it has to talk also about the good, and so about bad and evil, but also about politics and power.

This article is an inquiry into “crisis” as an analytical concept, eventually to be applied upon the “democracy”. It  recovers the conceptual history of the concept of crisis. Throughout history, from its origin in Greek mythology and philosophy, to its modern scientific meanings, crisis has always been connected to the idea of “immanence” and an apparent opposition between subjectivity and objectivity. The concept of crisis explores the boundaries between judgment and process, between ideology and material circumstances and is therefore closely linked to the historical, dialectical, critical and emacipatory perspectives in social science. This crisis-perspective is applied in an analysis of the influence of the euro-crisis upon democracy within the setting of the Portuguese social conflict. Throughout history, every hegemonic crisis of capitalism has affected the dominant meanings of democracy. Hegemonic breakdown of the liberal, electoral representative democratic model in the peripheral areas of the European Union, created the space for – and is created by - divergent narratives about democracy.

Memos’s book examines the life and work of a major twentieth-century critical thinker, Cornelius Castoriadis. He belonged to, and influenced, the continental philosophers which included such intellectual movements as the French-based Situationist International. Castoriadis corresponded with such figures as Anton Pannekoek (a main theorist of council communism) regarding the bureaucratic state capitalist nature of the USSR.

This chapter explores attempts by different social forces to interpret the complex global financial and economic crisis as it unfolded from 2006 to the end of 2009. Much mainstream commentary has read the crisis from the viewpoints of capital accumulation rather than social reproduction, the global North rather than the global South, and the best way for states to restore rather than constrain the dominance of market forces. Such commentaries reflect government responses to the crisis, especially in the global North. Executive authorities reacted quickly with emergency measures to safeguard the monetary, banking and credit systems to prevent large banks and firms going bankrupt, and to restore the conditions for capital accumulation. They have been slower to respond to the needs of ‘social reproduction’ in daily, life course, and intergenerational terms; and to take effective action on impending environmental, food and fuel crises. I will explicate these differences in terms of how competing narratives about the crisis framed policy responses, and how structures of economic, political and ideological domination enabled economic and political elites in key power centres to push the risks and costs of crisis-management onto subaltern groups and developing countries. Thus, besides identifying the key responses from the global North, I examine developing countries’ engagement through, for example, the G-20, the so-called Stiglitz Commission established by the President of the 63rd General Assembly of the United Nations and the associated summit (United Nations General Assembly 2008; United Nations 2009a, 2009b), the G-77 and the People’s Republic of China (hereafter China), and efforts at South-South cooperation. I also comment briefly on social movement and activist groups and post-neoliberal futures.

RESUMO
A Teoria Clássica da Crise da Educação é a abordagem utilizada pelos teóricos da educação para compreender a constituição e explicar a crise educacional na sociedade contemporânea. Seguindo um breve esboço do conceito de crise e da historiografia da noção de crise educacional da Segunda Guerra Mundial à recessão neoliberal de 1980-82, este artigo apresenta um esboço da Teoria Clássica da Crise da Educação conforme exposto de maneira mais completa no clássico de Madan Sarup: Educação, Estado e Crise: Uma Perspectiva Marxista (1982). O cerne da Teoria Clássica está no fato de que as crises da educação são derivadas das crises econômicas. Posteriormente, é apresentada a Crítica da Teoria Clássica. Sua relação com o pensamento estruturalista (e sua vinculação ao determinismo, funcionalismo e reducionismo) bem como o influxo do imperialismo da economia são algumas de suas principais deficiências. A conclusão indica o terreno a percorrer e reforça a necessidade de se avançar à perspectiva da Teoria Clássica da Crise da Educação.
Palavras-chave: Crise. Teoria da crise da educação. Imperialismo da economia.

ABSTRACT
The Classical Theory of Education Crisis is the default theory utilised by educational theorists for understanding the constitution and explanation of education crises in contemporary society. Following a brief outline of the concept of crisis, and the histiography of the notion of education crisis from the Second World War to the neoliberal recession of 1980-82, there is an outline of The Classical Theory of Education Crisis as most fully expressed in Madan Sarup’s classic Education, State and Crisis: A Marxist Perspective (1982). The key aspect of the Classical Theory is that education crises are derivative of economic crises. This is followed by the main event: critique of the Classical Theory. Its reliance on structuralist thought (with associated determinism, functionalism and reductionism) and the inflow of economics imperialism are some of its key deficiencies. The Conclusion outlines ground still to be covered and the need to move beyond the Classical Theory of Education Crisis.
Keywords: Crisis. Educational crisis theory. Economics imperialism.

Resumo A " crise do Império romano do século III " configura um dos elementos mais tradicionais em meio aos estudos historiográficos dedicados à história imperial romana. Entretanto, nas últimas décadas têm se observado a emergência de sérios questionamentos a essa perspectiva. Desta maneira, o presente artigo busca delinear em que consistiriam as críticas à concepção de crise do século III, a partir da exposição das propostas defendidas por historiadores como Karl Strobel, Christian Witschel e Gonzalo Bravo Castañeda. Por fim, indico uma possibilidade de se preservar o emprego do conceito de crise ao tomá-lo como expressão de um " momento crítico/decisivo ". Palavras-chave: Crise do século III; Império romano; estudos historiográficos. Abstract The third century crisis of the Roman Empire is one of the most conventional features on the historiographical agenda of the Roman Imperial period. However, the validity of that idea has been questioned over the last decades. Considering that, this study aims to highlight particular aspects lying at the basis of those critical approaches to the third century crisis. In doing so, I take a close look at the works of historians such as Karl Strobel, Christian Witschel and Gonzalo Bravo Castañeda. In the end, I suggest a way to deal with the concept of crisis by defining it as a " critical/decisive " moment in history. Keywords: The crisis of the third century; the Roman Empire; historiographical studies.

Who made the crisis theory of Tendential Falling Rate of Profit (TFRP)? A debate on crisis theory of TFRP took place in 2013 in Monthly Review. But it did not make any progress. This paper will show its idle running and suggest an idea for the theory. By doing so, we could reach a more confident and clearer theoretical position on how to use the Great Thinker's legacy. Heinrich says Marx did not prove TFRP. • TFRP does not exist. Marx proved nothing on the TFRP itself. Accordingly, we don't need to say about the counter factors to relieve that. • Nobody knows which one is bigger between increase of exploitation rate and that of organic composition of capital. • Marx did not consider increase of relative surplus value through the increase of productivity. Heinrich says Engels edited Capital vol. III wrongly – on Crisis theory of Tendential Falling Rate of Profit(CTFRP) " Its division into three separate chapters was done by Engels. The first two chapters on the " law as such " and the " counteracting factors " closely follow Marx's argumentation, but the manuscript then flows out into a sea of notes and constantly interrupted thoughts. Engels heavily revised this material to construct the third chapter on the 'law': he condensed it with abridgments, he made rearrangements, and divided it into four subsections. This created the impression of an already largely completed theory of crisis. And since Engels gave the whole things the title 'development of the Law's internal contradictions,' he created – on the part of readers who did not know that this chapter title did not at all originate with Marx-the expectation that this theory of crisis was a consequence of the 'law' " (2013). [Underlined by citer] The opposite responds it weakly " We are no experts on the origination of each chapter in Capital, but we are not convinced that Engels making up a title for one of the chapters on CTFRP in sufficient to dismiss Engels's efforts to put Marx's detailed notes together into some order without misleading the reader about Marx's intentions " (Carchedi and Robert, 2013) What Marx says on TFRP in MEGA

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And what can workers, youth and the dispossessed of the world do to defend ourselves and to ‘bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old’, in the words of the US labour hymn, Solidarity Forever?

The article aims to set up a bibliographic basis to develop Marxist crisis theories by using the new English translation of MEGA II 4.2 in 2015(F. Mosley ed., Marx's economic manuscript 1864-65, Brill). In December of 2013, a debate on the crisis theory of the tendential fall in the rate of profit (CTFRP and TFRP) took place on the Monthly Review. One side of the debate was Michael Heinreich. He denied the existence of CTFRP by interpreting that there is no remark on the law of TFRP in Capital by Marx. Moreover, he insisted Engels revised Marx's manuscript for Capital volume three wrongly and his mistake brought about a misunderstanding that CTFRP exists and was achieved in Capital by Marx. But he did not prove how the Engels' revision led the misunderstanding as the opposite side criticised on him. Meanwhile, the opposite did not investigate the MEGA II 4.2, which was used by Heinreich, to argue the existence of CTFRP instead of saying that the crisis theory was fully investigated in the amended plan of critics of political economy by establishing three volume structure of Capital. The article suggests dividing the given CTFRP into crisis theory and TFRP temporary for its analysing on the abstract concepts. The article shows the reason of the debate's idle running and suggests an idea for the theory. By doing so, we could reach a more confident and clearer theoretical position on how to use the Great thinker's legacy.

Podemos aprender cuestiones importantes sobre este evento particular denominado "crisis 2001". Quizá esta meta de conocimiento sea algo frustrante para quienes esperan conocer las causas de las crisis y cómo superarlas, pero de acuerdo a mi intención de estudiar cómo las personas experimentan, piensan, hablan sobre la crisis, sostengo que por este camino podemos realizar contribuciones a la agenda de investigación sobre los modos de pensar la Argentina por parte de los argentinos. Al mismo tiempo, entiendo que el estudio de circunstancias críticas como la que aquí refiero puede ayudarnos a entender mejor la índole de estos eventos más allá del caso específico argentino, así como el modo en que los actores se las arreglan para organizar las experiencias de lo vivido y generar respuestas. Voy a proponer un recorrido que permita, en primer lugar, entender cómo se constituyen los eventos que llamamos habitualmente crisis. Y para ello, quiero detenerme en especial sobre el lugar que tienen los medios de comunicación. Quiero sugerir aquí que en nuestras sociedades los medios tienen un papel decisivo en la definición de la existencia y sentido de los eventos en tanto "crisis", y qué esto posee consecuencias muy especiales. Definir una situación como ?crisis? no es algo independiente de las interpretaciones de la misma buscando causas, responsabilidades y salidas. Estas tareas interpretativas sólo pueden ser gestadas por ciertos personajes públicos que dispongan de una determinada autoridad, lo cual dependerá de las circunstancias cambiantes en cada caso, y de la potencialidad de reconocimiento de tal autoridad por parte de las diferentes audiencias. Al menos en el caso argentino, una vez instituida la crisis, los medios de comunicación apelaron a la autoridad de ciertos intérpretes, quienes a través de sus intervenciones públicas activaron la circulación de narraciones sobre los orígenes de la nación. A través de éstas, pretendieron hacer inteligibles las causas de los males presentes como un episodio de los males del pasado. La producción y circulación de imágenes de futuro en tiempos de incertidumbre dependía de si esta cadena fatídica podía ser rota para siempre.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute To the formulation of a theory of crisis.

The lack of a theory of crisis is a significant gap in our theory of cultural and social dynamics. Edward Spicer has made a major contribution to our understanding of the structural nature of
socio-cultural stability when he describes the features of the cultural enclave(1966) and the persistent cultural systems (1971). What these formulations have lacked, however, is a mechanism which describes the conditions under which one socio-cultural system survives the impact of a dominant cultural system while another succumbs to this pressure. A theory of socio-cultural crisis is required for developing a dynamic theory of cultural persistence.
David Bidney (1946) has provided a theoretical model which is applied top answering this question.