Is the Crisis Cascading into Violence?

Is the crisis – erupting in finance in 2007, and cascading through the economy, the fiscal, and the political – now leading to an increase in violence?  Is the mid-twentieth century European nightmare, in which financial crisis led to economic recession, fascism and violence, being repeated today?  Answering this question requires a theory of crisis and of the connection between economy and violence. What constitutes crisis is contested.  The construction of government deficits as if they entailed fiscal crisis to be treated as a state of exception is not inevitable.  The cascading of crisis from one institutional domain to another is not inevitable, since renewed democratic forces potentially provide sites of resilience and resistance.  The connection between finance and the economy is contested.  The potential of the democratic regulation of capital to reduce the instability of finance is underestimated in social theory. What constitutes a change in violence is contested.  The claim that there is a continuing decline in the rate of violence is contradicted when the increase in gender based violence is made visible through new methodologies.  The theorisation of crisis is developed using complexity science and a reworking of the concept of social system.