"Marx's Theory of Crisis as a Theory of Class Struggle" (original) (raw)

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.

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