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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
