SIMOULIDIS, JOHN.

MARXIAN CRISIS THEORY AND THE ROLE OF INTEREST:

AN UNOIST APPROACH

The paper to be presented can be best appreciated within the context of two fairly
recent trends in Marxian political economy. Interest in multilayered analyses of the
capitalist economy has been revived (by French Regulationists, the Social Structure of
Accumulation School and others) since the collapse of the Keynesian consensus in the
early 1970s. This particular trend has been motivated by an effort to distinguish
between what is essential to capitalism in all of its phases and the historically specific
forms it has taken. The second, more recent, trend has been a renewed interest in
Marxs relationship to Hegel in terms of his dialectical method and its application to the
critical analysis of capital and the law of value. In both respects, it is my view that
Unoist political economy has gone the furthest in distinguishing the different layers or
levels of analysis and in applying the dialectical method to the study of capital at the
most abstract level of analysis. What I will seek to do is illustrate the uniqueness of this
approach by examining a particular aspect of Marxian crisis theory, the relationship
between the rate of profit and the rate of interest at the most abstract level of analysis,
and the ways in which this relationship is mediated by institutional forms at more
concrete levels of analysis that are not anticipated at this most abstract level.
The necessity of analyzing the capitalist economy in terms of different levels of analysis
is based on the understanding that the social reproduction of any society cannot be
fully subsumed by the commodity-economic logic of capital. While there are many
reasons why this is the case, perhaps the most fundamental is that the accumulation of
capital is essentially dependent upon a non-capitalist commodity, labour power. Marx
analyzed the regulation of industrial capitalism through the law of value, whereby the
competition between capitals would tend towards the equalization of profit rates and all
commodities would be supplied in socially necessary quantities and produced with
socially necessary labour-time. But the law of value cannot directly regulate the supply
of non-capitalistically produceable commodities. Periodic crises are necessary to
ensure the continued commodification of labour power.
In the theory of a purely capitalist economy, the rate of profit and the rate of interest
have a clear relationship that is governed by the commodity-economic logic of capital.
A particular variant of an excess capital theory of crisis (labour-power shortage) will be
presented that sees crises triggered as the rate of interest gradually rise above the rate
of profit and as capital moves from a phase of extensive to intensive accumulation. At
the level of intermediate or stage theory, the relationship between the rate of profit and
the rate of interest is mediated by a variety of social institutions. Here, the role of state
economic policy and the rise of oligopoly led Uno (and before him, Hilferding and
Lenin) to study how these could reduce the acuteness of periodic crises yet lead to the
necessity of imperialist war. Finally, I will attempt to identify some of the problems
associated with attempting to determine the relationship between the rate of interest
and the rate of profit at the level of historical analysis, given that both interest rates and
profit rates within and between countries and industries can be so radically divergent.