Awhile back I wrote a piece called, “Capitalism and Why” and made it one of my pages here on my blog.  This is a follow-up to that piece.  With the US economy tumbling head long into ruin, the question is still revelent if not more so.  Massive financial failures, unemployment, outsourcing, so on and I am sure there are others that we should add, but we will start here.

Of course it is–it is ALWAYS in one form of crisis or another….it is the nature of the beast.

In an unregulated or deregulated system, creditors routinely manipulate people of low and moderate incomes, often desperate people, to take loans which they then sell to those higher on the financial food chain, creating a house of cards based on quick profits gained from such manipulation. No one is safe, including the investors in the institutions at the top of the financial food chain, those in the higher professional and managerial strata with income significantly higher than most of the people who think of themselves as “middle class.” This dynamic creates a political economy which, to paraphrase the 17th century Philosopher Thomas Hobbes, encourages a war of all against all.

Crises of this kind, that is, instability rooted in the anarchic drive of capital to find ever bigger markets, drive out competitors, commodify all goods, services, and social relations, is the heart of the capitalist system. Each crisis grows greater with capitalist consolidation and expansion.
This specific crisis is peculiar to the capitalist system as it has evolved into bank-controlled monopoly or finance capital. In recent decades this system, or state monopoly capitalism, has substantially done away with the regulatory reforms whose purpose was to save it from itself, devolving or deregulating itself into a speculative market jungle, but one where the state funds are still available to protect speculators.
Money is made not by creating new productive capacity in a national economy(which the old Robber Barons, with all their horrors, did do), but by financial piracy and loan sharking, manipulating stock prices, reducing dividends to general shareholders, merging companies, cutting jobs, cannibalizing pensions to repay the debts created such activities and walking away with super-profits.

Yes it is in crisis, but then it will always be in crisis.