ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a framework for understanding causes and consequences of massive and global crisis. Beginning with a preliminary sketch of the various ways in which the term 'crisis' has been understood this time, and the central importance they all attach to 'financialisation', the chapter examines the nature of the extraordinary expansion of the financial services sector in recent decades, and argues that it is inseparable from important changes in the institutions and practices of capitalist production. These changes in turn need to be placed in the context of the simultaneous intensification of global integration, affecting not only material production but also the nature of the state and the states-system. Taken together, financialisation and globalisation are central elements in neoliberalism, the left's critique of which, the chapter concludes, needs to be centred on a class analysis, rather than on the conventional 'states versus markets' approach, if a socialist alternative is developed based on equality, democracy and sustainable livelihoods.
