"Marx's crisis theory as a theory of class struggle" (original) (raw)

1982, Research in Political Economy

AI-generated Abstract

The essay explores Marx's crisis theory, emphasizing its origins in class struggle and its integral connection to Marx and Engels' political endeavors. It contrasts its exposition of capitalist accumulation and crises with prevailing crisis theories by framing capital's development as essentially rooted in class relations and conflict, leading to unforeseen outcomes termed 'laws of motion.' The work highlights the significance of the capitalist class's monopoly and the indirect coercion behind labor commodification, ultimately defining class relations within capitalism through imposed labor and the resistance of the working class.

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ON MARX'S CRISIS THEORY IN THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT OF THE 3RD VOLUME OF CAPITAL

The notion of capital overaccumulation, as constructed by Marx in Volume 3 of Capital on the basis of his "preliminary definition" of "absolute overproduction", is considered in this paper as the key element of Marx's crisis theory. Following what the author considers as the logic of Marx's analysis, the paper concludes that economic crises shall be identified neither with the law of the tendential fall in the profit rate, nor with some supposedly intrinsic underconsuption of the labouring classes. Instead, crises shall be comprehended as the outcome of the fusion of a variety of factors which suppress the rate of profit. An economic crisis can be described, therefore, as a conjunctural overaccumulation, i.e. a conjunctural production of commodities (means of production and means of consumption) in such quantities and prices, that they temporarily hinder the accumulation process. In the last instance, all categories of factors affecting the value composition of capital and the profit rate are overdetermined by class- struggle, the main object of which is the (level of) exploitation of the labour force.

An Essay on the Crisis of Capitalism - a la Marx?

2012

The paper argues that a crisis of collective agency is at the root of the global economic crisis we face today. The secret of prosperous capitalism, the so-called golden age, was the ability of the state to uniformly impose welfare-enhancing market restrictions that made it possible to invest in common pool resources. This ability has waned during the neoliberal era and the result has been a resurgence of forces of competition-what Marx called the law of value-generating long-term collective costs that go increasingly unaddressed. This is reminiscent of classical capitalism's main weakness with respect to organizing corrective collective action, making a couple of Marx's points resonate today. What is profitable at the micro level ends up being at variance with human welfare as well as the long-term collective interest of capitalists, because coordination failure is not only endemic but also a defining characteristic of capitalist competition.

"Theses on Secular Crises in Capitalism: The Insurpassability of Class Antagonisms"

1996

We are writing and talking about crisis today, as we have been doing for the last two decades, because we have been participating in a global crisis of capitalism which can be dated from at least the late 1960s. In terms of duration, depth and scope, this crisis ranks with that of the 1930s -which is understood to have lasted from before the crash of 1929 through World War II to the onset of the postwar era of Pax Americana via the Marshall Plan in Western Europe, the restructuring of Japan and the initiation of the Cold War. We are writing and talking about secular crisis because neither the cyclical business downturns nor the upturns, nor a whole series of capitalist counter-measures (local and international), have resolved the underlying problems of the system in such a way as to lay the basis for a renewal of stable accumulation. Thus, secular crisis means the continuing threat to the existence of capitalism posed by antagonistic forces and trends which are inherent in its social structure and which persist through short term fluctuations and major restructurings.

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