>Carrol:

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Carrol:

What is the political importance of understanding the economics of a
>particular recession (or boom)?
>
>Marx's concern with crises, as with other features of capitalism, was
>primarily, it seems to me, focused on the question of whether capitalism
>was a "natural" or historical system, not on doing economic analyses of
>particular occasions (such as the present).

boy this utter theoretical annihilation of Marx just has to stop on pen-l

My goodness, Carrol,  the historicizing of both the categories of
political economy and the capitalist economy had been accomplished
before Marx--Steuart, Sismondi and Richard Jones (see Grossman,
Journal of Political Economy, Dec 1943). Marx assumed this work and
clarified it. Korsch refers to it as the principle of historical
specificity (see Karl Korsch Karl Marx 1938).

But  Marx's wholly original tasks included:

1. to develop a general theory of transitions from one mode of
production to another--the so called materialist theory of history
which explains said transitions as a climax of an inevitable conflict
between productive forces and the property relations of the society

2. to develop a specific theory of the objective developmental
tendencies of the the historically specific capitalist system itself
(the main task is to illuminate the law of motion as he says).

3. to clarify the singular role of the class struggle in effecting
transitions in the mode of production, that is class struggle as the
subjective vehicle of change.

Carrol, we do not speak of the Marxian revolution in the same breath
as the ones  effected by Newton, Darwin and Einstein because he
historicized economics!

^^^^^^^

Rakesh, this post kind of undercuts your claim to understand Marx's theory and ideas more deeply than others here.  Marx's theory of the business cycle was not a particularly important expression of either 1), or 3) that you list above.  The business cycle is involved in 2) ,but is not its only aspect.