A critique of crisis theory (original) (raw)
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Routledge , 2021
Capitalism’s proneness to crises was apparent from its earliest days. Marx’s analysis identified the key reason: capitalism was a system aiming to produce not the goods and services people needed, but value itself. Such value or capital accumulation was a quixotic and contradictory enterprise, involving unjust exploitation and anarchic competition, contradictions that led to crises. However, Marx’s work remained incomplete. He did not fully develop another point: capitalism required practically impossible social arrangements that were perpetually close to failing or breaking down and burdened sociality itself to breaking point while also involving societies in competition and conflict. This essay outlines how the contradictions of value production were analysed by Marx and later critics of capitalism such as Keynes. It then discusses the additional mechanisms of crises inhering in its impossible demands on society and nature to outline the sheer variety of crises that arise from capitalist value production and the social fragility it requires.
Capitalist Crises and the Crisis this Time
Socialist Register, 2011
E xactly a hundred and fifty years before the current crisis began in August 2007, the collapse of the Ohio Life Insurance Company in New York triggered what became known as 'the great crisis of 1857-8'. As it quickly spread to Europe's main financial centres, Karl Marx 'was delighted and thrilled by the prospects for another revolutionary upsurge on the continent'. As Michael Kratke notes, 'the crisis started exactly as Marx had predicted already in 1850-with a financial crisis in New York' and the crisis itself led Marx to extend 'the scope and scale of his study' for the Grundrisse notebooks he was working on, so as to take account of 'the first world economic crisis, affecting all regions of the world'. In their correspondence, Marx and Engels agreed that 'the crisis was larger and much more severe than any crisis before', viewing the financial crisis as 'only the foreplay to the real crisis, the industrial crisis that would affect the very basis of British prosperity and supremacy'. 1 In October 1857, Engels wrote to Marx: 'The American crash is superb and will last for a long time... Now we have a chance'. And two weeks later: '…in 1848 we were saying: now our moment is coming, and in a certain sense it was, but this time it is coming completely and it is a case of life or death'. 2 As the crisis abated and began to fade away in mid-1858, Marx tried to understand why it had not turned out as expected. He came to the conclusion that the relatively rapid recovery could be largely explained by the sharp depreciation of capital on a large scale and an equally sharp and major shift in the structure of exports from Europe towards the colonies, with this especially applying to British industry which was then so central to global capital accumulation. This allowed for a return to dynamic capitalist growth, while at the same time reproducing the contradictions which, as Marx wrote in the Grundrisse, would lead again to 'crises in which momentary suspension of all labour and annihilation of a great part of the
Marxist Theories of Crisis and the Current Economic Crisis
Forum for Social Economics, 2012
This paper uses data from the US economy and finds that among Marxist theories of crisis the marxian law of the falling rate of profit as a result of the increasing composition of capital explains the crisis of the 1970s and the end of the “golden age” of capital accumulation. Despite the dramatic increase in the rate of surplus value
Working paper no.39: Finance and crisis: Marxian, institutionalist andcircuitist approaches
2014
Most mainstream neoclassical economists completely failed to anticipate the crisis which broke in 2007 and 2008. There is however a long tradition of economic analysis which emphasises how growth in a capitalist economy leads to an accumulation of tensions and results in periodic crises. This paper first reviews the work of Karl Marx who was one of the first writers to incorporate an analysis of periodic crisis in his analysis of capitalist accumulation. The paper then considers the approach of various subsequent Marxian writers, most of whom locate periodic cyclical crises within the framework of longer-term phases of capitalist development, the most recent of which is generally seen as having begun in the 1980s. The paper also looks at the analyses of Thorstein Veblen and Wesley Claire Mitchell, two US institutionalist economists who stressed the role of finance and its contribution to generating periodic crises, and the Italian Circuitist writers who stress the problematic challe...
The Economic Crisis: A Marxian Interpretation
Rethinking Marxism, 2010
Like most capitalist crises, today's challenges economists, journalists, and politicians to explain and to overcome it. The post-1930s struggles between neoclassical and Keynesian economics are rejoined. We show that both proved inadequate to preventing crises and served rather to enable and justify (as ''solutions'' for crises) what were merely oscillations between two forms of capitalism differentiated according to greater or lesser state economic interventions. Our Marxian economic analysis here proceeds differently. We demonstrate how concrete aspects of U.S. economic history (especially real wage, productivity, and personal indebtedness trends) culminated in this deep and enduring crisis. We offer both a class-based critique of and an alternative to neoclassical and Keynesian analyses, including an alternative solution to capitalist crises.