HISTORY OF PERIODIC CRISES IN CAPITALISM: IS MARX'S APPROACH STILL SIGNIFICANT?

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...

Socialist Register, 2011

'Marx and the theory of economic crisis', a 2-part lecture for freshers (without a concise background in Marxist economics)

Capitalist Macrodynamics, 1997

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

Science & Society, 2010

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.

Labour / Le Travail, 1986

Rethinking Marxism, 2010