[...] the reproduction of capitalist social relations depends upon waves of cost-cutting, labour-saving investment but also on levels of employment that generate the income and surplus income that sustain this process—a difficult balance that over the long term might lead to permanent unemployment on an ever larger scale. It might be said then that the current historical situation is both a continuation and a structural convolution of this process, resulting from the failure of new phases of accumulation to materialize. The slowdown of the wheel of capitalist accumulation—staved off by publicly subsidized financialization, burgeoning debt levels and the new extremes of inequality—has led to a structural transformation in which its ‘laws of motion’ are faltering. The underlying value-determinations of the price system are being warped out of their earlier shapes with little prospect of a return to ‘normal times’ by the very efforts of the leading powers to keep the system afloat.