Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory

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Untitled Anarchism Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory

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Author : Paul Mattick

(1904 - 1981)

Paul Mattick Sr. (March 13, 1904 – February 7, 1981) was a Marxist political writer and social revolutionary, whose thought can be placed within the council communist and left communist traditions. Throughout his life, Mattick continually criticized Bolshevism, Vladimir Lenin and Leninist organizational methods, describing their political legacy as "serving as a mere ideology to justify the rise of modified capitalist (state-capitalist) systems, which were [...] controlled by way of an authoritarian state". (From: Wikipedia.org.)

Chapters

Preface

It was not so long ago that Keynesian economics seemed to offer instrumentalities not only to overcome depressions but to avoid them altogether. This is no longer true, as we find ourselves in a post-Keynesian world in which neither the equilibrium tendencies of supply and demand nor Keynesian interventions in the economic processes are able to prevent the steady deterioration of the economy through rising inflation and growing unemployment. Due to the long postwar prosperity in the leading capitalist nations, this has come to many people as an unpleasant surprise and has led to a new concern with the problem of the capitalist crisis. Although largely ignored by bourgeois economists before 1929, crises accompanied the whole of cap... (From: Marxists.org.)

Chapter 1 : Bourgeois Economics

The progressive development of the capitalist economy was from the start a process punctuated by setbacks. There were good and bad times and for this an explanation was sought. That social production was at first still dominated by agriculture made it possible to find the cause of economic distress in the inconstancy of nature. Bad harvests could be blamed for the general scarcity of goods. In addition, the low productivity of agricultural labor, in the context of a growing population, awakened the fear that the development of capitalist production would run up against natural limits, indicating the inevitability of a stationary state. Bourgeois political economy was colored by a deep pessimism, which was overcome only with the acc... (From: Marxists.org.)

Chapter 2 : Marx’s Crisis Theory

The stagnation of bourgeois economics with respect to its content was for Marx a foregone conclusion. “Classical political economy,” he wrote, belongs to a period in which the class struggle was as yet undeveloped. Its last great representative, Ricardo, ultimately (and consciously) made the antagonism of class interests, of wages and profits, of profits and rent, the starting-point of his investigations, naively taking this antagonism for a social law of nature, but with this contradiction the bourgeois science of economics had reached the limits beyond which it could not pass.... In France and England the bourgeoisie had conquered political power. From this time on, the class struggle took on more and more expli... (From: Marxists.org.)

Chapter 3 : The Epigones

The crises of the nineteenth century displayed characteristics which were connected equally with the level attained by capitalist development and with political events. Thus the crisis of 1816 was without a doubt closely connected with the many years of war preceding Napoleon’s fall. In particular English capital, despite the increasing mechanization of labor, had grown too quickly in relation to its valorization requirements to be able to avoid crisis by way of further expansion. The stagnation that set in manifested itself as overproduction, which, as I Consequence of the impoverishment of continental Europe, could not be overcome by means of foreign trade. This resulted in a violent collapse of prices, which hit agricultur... (From: Marxists.org.)

Chapter 4 : Splendor and Misery of the Mix...

The second global economic crisis of this century was transformed due to the provocation of imperialist competition, into the First World War. To the usual devaluation of capital by crisis, combined with its concentration and centralization, was now added the physical destruction of means of production and labor power. Connected to this was a shift in the balance of economic power from the European nations to the United States. America became the greatest exporting and creditor nation in the world. The territorial changes brought about by the war, the removal of Russia from the world economy, the capitalist reparations policy, the breakdown of currencies and the world market-all this made the reconstruction much more difficult than... (From: Marxists.org.)

Chapter 5 : Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalis...

In the field of present-day Marxism, Ernest Mandel occupies a leading position. His industry and ambition have produced a small library of Marxism to which even bourgeois economists pay some respect. In his book Late Capitalism, Mandel practices a sort of self-criticism with respect to his earlier works. In particular he criticizes his Marxist Economic Theory, first, for its “exaggeratedly descriptive character,” and then for its “too small effort to explain the contemporary history of capitalism by its immanent laws of motion” (p. 7, German ed.).Since the later book contains Mandel’s corrections of his earlier works, Late Capitalism must be seen as representing, if not Mandel’s final conception... (From: Marxists.org.)

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