The meaning of crisis

by James O’Connor

This article is a critical review of the traditional or ‘scientific’ marxist theory of

crisis based on the definition of crises as an interruption in the accumulation of
capital, or ‘system disintegration,’ and, more broadly, on the concept of the inner
logic or ‘objective laws of motion’ of capitalist economy. It advances a critique of
the traditional interpretation of Marx’s thesis that ‘the limit of capital is capital
itself in terms of the tendency of the falling rate of profit and overproduction of
capital. This article also contains a brief critical account of the dominant ‘neo-
marxist’ theory of crisis based on the definition of crisis as an interruption of
normative structures of action or ‘social disintegration’. It concludes with a re-
construction of the concept of crisis as a ‘social conflict’ or ‘class struggle’ and
‘social reintegration’ which is presented as a marxist alternative to the radical
Durkheimianism of ‘neomarxism’.

I Traditional marxist economic crisis theory

In his study of the historical uses of the word ‘crisis’ Randolph Starn (1971)
writes that the word ‘comes from the Greek (kpinein: to sift, to decide), meaning
discrimination or decision’. Crises were defined in classical Greek history writing
as ‘moments of truth when the significance of men and events were brought to
light’. The word was also used in Greek medicine to signify the turning point of
an illness ‘in which it is decided’, Habermas writes, ‘whether or not the organism’s
self-healing powers are sufficient for recovery’ (Habermas, 1975, l).l All of these
usages focus on the concept of crisis as ‘turning point’ and ‘decision’. Nineteenth
century ‘crisis historians’ similarly used the word to mean ‘critical moments when
national character and institutions were thought to have been decisively tested.’
In traditional ‘scientific’ manrist theory, economic crisis is defined as an inter-
ruption in the accumulation of capital (Fine, 1975, 51). Capitalist crises are inter-
preted as ‘objective’ processes of system dysfunction or system disintegration
governed by the law of value which works itself out behind people’s back. The
’ In Starn’s words, crises ‘occur in diseases whenever the disease increases in intensity or
goes away or changes into another disease or ends altogether’.
302 The meaning of crisis

capitalist system itself ‘decides’ its own ‘turning points’ or critical moments of
economic crisis, contraction, depression. In this view, human beings do not con-
sciously produce economic crises nor can human intervention within the dominant
capitalist relations of production actually prevent crises, although it is thought
that crises can be postponed or displaced. These uses of the concept of crisis are
clearly similar to the use of the word by medical science. Habermas writes that
the critical moment ‘appears as something objective’ or external, hence ‘the crisis
cannot be separated from the viewpoint of the one who is undergoing it - during
an illness the patient experiences his powerlessness vis-d-vis the objectivity of his
illness only because he is a subject condemned to passivity and temporarily de-
prived of the possibility of being a subject in full possession of his powers’.
Habermas concludes that ‘we therefore associate with crises the idea of an objective
force that deprives a subject of some part of his normal sovereignty’.
In traditional marxist economic theory, the ‘subject’ is capital itself, or the
process of capitalist wealth production, which is deprived of its ‘normal sover-
eignty’ by the ‘objective’ or external force of economic crises. Capital defined as
the social relationship of valorization loses full possession of its powers when too
many, too large, and too prolonged ruptures occur in the three circuits of capital.
Capital’s ordeal ends with the restoration of its ‘sovereigr,ty’ through the process
of the many varieties of capital restructuring. In historical versions of crises theory,
the nature of capital restructuring is determined by the relationship between the
composition of capital and the composition of the working class, in turn determin-
ed by the effects of past crises and crises resolutions. In short, crisis is seen as a
turning point in the economic process in which it is decided whether the system’s
‘self-healing powers’ are sufficient for the recovery and renewal of capital accumu-
lation.
It has often been remarked that there is no single or dominant crisis theory in
Marx’s own work. ‘Marx himself explicitly rejects any monocausal explanation of
crises’, Ernest Mandel writes, ‘insisting that they are a combination of all the
contradictions of the capitalist mode of production (Mandel, 1975, 3). Theories
of crisis in fact appear and reappear in Capital in hauntingly similar ways to those
in which economic crises appeared and reappeared in the west through the great
depression of the 1930s. One reason is that no single or dominant definition of
crisis exists in either Capital or later marxist theoretical works. At the risk of
oversimplifying a complex issue, it is possible to identify three kinds of crisis in
marxist thought. The first are the periodic crises associated with the capitalist
business cycle in general and cyclical movements of the rate of profit in particular.
‘The cyclical movement of capitalist production’, Mandel continues, ‘undoubtedly
find its clearest expression in the cyclical movement of the rate of profit, which
after all sums up the contradictory development of all the moments of the process
of production and reproduction’ (Mandel, 1975). The extreme view that all capital-
ist crises are cyclical crises is exemplified by Howard Sherman’s reproach that
‘all theories of long-run crises are incorrect’ and that ‘there are no long-run down-
turns or final automatic collapses of capitalism’ (Sherman, 1979,75).
 James 0 %onnor 303

The second kind of crises which appears in marxist theory are precisely long
run or structural crises which are analysed in terms of the long-run tendency for
the rate of profit to fall or in the context of an ‘accumulation model’ or both.
The rela’tively ‘technical’ approach to structural crises is to explain secular declines
in the profit rate in terms of the rising value composition of capital, while explain-
ing cyclical movements in the rate of profit in terms of the uneven development of
the capital and consumer good sectors of the economy (Mandel, 1975, 4). The
structuralist approach employs what Samir Amin has called an ‘accumulation
model’. ‘The idea behind the concept is that the expansive periods of the accumu-
lation process take place within the framework of a specific capital structure, a
specific class structure, a certain dominant ideology, and specific institutions.
This framework can be said to form a specific accumulation model. The relation-
ship between the accumulation model and a structural crisis is then explained
by pointing out how the structural framework of the accumulation model develops
increasingly contradictory and how, because of this, the accumulation model
turns into a structural crisis. Structural crises can therefore be viewed as periods
in the history of capitalist development where one accumulation model is sub-
stituted for another, i.e., where some structures deteriorate and others are built.’*
This approach is consistent with Eric Hobsbawm’s definition of ‘crises of capita-
lism’ as the ‘rather lengthy periods of trouble, between 1815 and 1848, between
1873 and 1896, and between 1917 and 1948’ (Hobsbawn, 1976, 79). It is also
consistent with the ‘world system’ theorists’ broader concept of crisis, together
with Robert Heilbroner’s view that economic expansions, crises, and depressions
or stagnations do not occur periodically or repetitively but rather at ‘crucial junc-
tures’ which bring about ‘changes in seismic magnit~de’.~ Finally, the ‘accumula-
tion model’ method is akin to the analyses of Gundar Frank, Ernest Mandel, and
others who have argued that modern capitalism entered into a new structural
crisis sometime in the 1960s, one which will not be resolved merely by policies
aimed to increase the profit rate, but which will require thorough-going changes in
post second world war institutions which have become counterproductive for
capital (Gundar Frank, 1980). The difference between the concept of crisis as
periodic economic fluctuations and the structural crisis concept is that Amin,
Hobsbawm, el al., describe conjunctures and multiple contradictions within social,
economic, and political life while Sherman refers to the periodic cycle alone.
The bridge between these two definitions of crisis is erected in the accounts of the
present crisis by Frank, Mandel, and others who try to show that structural con-
tradictions of the system both cause and are caused by the increasingly short-
lived and shallow cyclical recoveries and deeper and long-lasting recessions during
the 1970s.
The final kind of crisis defined in marxist theory is sectoral crisis which is
normally associated with the process of uneven and combined development.
Jens Hoff, Letter to the author, 20 November 1980.
World capitalist crisis, in world system theory, occurs when there is a rupture or ‘disarticu-
lation’ between the processes of development of the world division of labour on the one hand
and state-formation/deforinationon the other (Heilbroner, 1978).
304 The meaning of crisis

Differences in the rate of profit between economic sectors and regions are explain-
ed in terms of the tendency for capital to accumulate in particular sectors and
regions at the expense of others. Uneven development occurs because the rate of
profit in branches of the economy dominated by large-scale capital concentrated
in certain regions is relatively high because large-scale capital appropriates surplus
value produced by other branches of the economy which are typified by small-scale
capital. Similar arguments have been applied to profit rates in the developed in-
dustrial countries compared with those in the older underdeveloped regions of
world economy. Combined development in which relatively advanced technology
and forms of fwed capital are combined with relatively backward forms of labour
power has the opposite effect. Relatively backward zones are developed by modem
forms of capital at the expense of older industrial developed zones. The connection
between cyclical and structural crises and sectoral crises is simply that the latter
expresses the crucial spatial dimensions which are absent in the former. Today, for
example, it is commonly thought that the modern structural crisis of capitalism in
part assumes the form of the regional decline of the older northern and midwestern
industrial zones and the simultaneous development of the south, southwestern,
and western USA (Frobel et al., 1980; Bluestone and Harrison, 1980).
All three concepts of crisis and the different kinds of crisis theories advanced to
explain the periodic cycle, structural crises, and uneven and combined development
share the premise that capitalist economy is inherently crisis-ridden. Crisis theory
is based on the further idea that capitalism is also crisis-dependent, that is, that
crises are mechanisms whereby capitalism regulates itself. ‘ W e seeing crises as
the expression of the contradictions of capitalist production’, Michael Bleaney
writes, ‘Marx is very clear that they represent only a temporary break in the drive
to expansion, a recreation of the conditions of that expansion which have tem-
porarily broken down, rather than a manifestation of a tendency to stagnate’
(Bleaney, 1976, 110-19). Some marxist theorists argue that structural and sectoral
crises alone ‘self-construct’ through the process of capital restructuring.‘What
defines a situation of structural crisis’, Manuel Castells writes, ‘is that it becomes
impossible to expand or reproduce the system without a transformation or re-
organization of the basic characteristics of production, distribution, and manage-
ment, and their expression in terms of social organization’ (Castells, 1980, 8).
Other theorists argue that capital restructuring in the form of weeding out of
inefficient enterprises, strengthening of larger and more efficient capitals, down-
grading of job structures, and so on also characterize the periodic capitalist cycle.
The historical record clearly shows that western capitalism has been convulsed
by cyclical and structural economic crises which have assumed different forms in
different times and places. Economic history also shows that crises and depressions
have been periods of capital restructuring or ‘self-construction’. While historians
have often understood crises to be ‘immanent’ in the historical process, historical
evidence cannot prove that capitalism is inherently crisis-ridden nor still less that
it is crisis-dependent. Crisis theory has a definite logical status within the proble-
matic of Marx’s theory of capital and anyone who adopts this problematic is
 James O’Connor 305

forced to demonstrate logically that economic crises not only happened in history
but were historically necessary and ‘inevitable’.

I1 Structural origins of economic crisis

In marxist theory economic crisis is always latent in capitalist economies for two
reasons: first, capitalist production is commodity production hence subject to
anarchy of the market; second, capitalist production is surplus value production
and realization. The first crisis potential exists because of the ‘split between the
sale and purchases’ of commodities which are produced for the market. (Marx,
edn 1967, I, 113). When this split becomes too great there occurs a disjuncture
in the process of capitalist reproduction (Fine, 1975, 58). The development of the
credit system (an ‘ever-lengthening chain of payments’) creates the possibility of
deeper money or credit crises which exacerbate other crisis tenden~ies.~ Mandel
(1975, 13) has argued that in ‘late capitalism’ ‘a credit cycle temporarily distinct
from the industrial cycle comes into being’. Ruptures within and between the
commodity and money (including credit) circuits of capital are manifested in
realization and/or liquidity c r i s e ~ . ~
The second potential for economic crisis exists because ‘the conditions of
direct exploitation, and those of realizing it, are not identical. They diverge not
only in place and time, but also logicully. The first are limited by the productive
power of society, the latter by the proportional relation of the various branches
of production and the consumer power of society (Marx, edn 1967, 111, 24445,
italics added). This is a logical contradiction because favorable conditions of surplus
value production imply unfavorable conditions of value realization and vice versu.
The reason is that the ‘consumer power of society’ is limited by the working class
share of total production and income which is inversely related to the ‘conditions
of direct exploitation’. Small consumption baskets and/or a low unit value content
of the average consumption basket facilitate surplus value production and for this
reason obstruct the realization of values. Everything else being the same, the result
is overproduction of capital. Big consumption baskets and/or a high unit value
content facilitate the realization of values and for this reason hold surplus value
production in check. The result is underproduction of capital. Overproduction and
underproduction of capital express themselves as realization and liquidity crises,
respectively, and both take the form of falling profit rates.
In addition, potentials for overproduction and underproduction of capital give
rise to possibilities of disproportionalities between effective demand and produced
‘Credit creates situations in which ‘forced sales’ or ‘sales to meet payments’ become necessary
when banks press for payments on loans and during times when merchant revenues are ‘slow
and meagre’. A well-developed credit system thus increases changes of a ‘crash’ or abrupt fall
in prices including prices of fixed constant capital (i.e. ‘devalorization’).The credit system is
governed by quasi-independentprocesses (de Brunhoff, 1976,107-1 18).
Tugan-Baronowsky and Hilferding believed that the anarchy of the market was the source of
crisis itself, not merely the source of crisis potential; hence their belief that state planning or
organized capitalism could prevent or ameliorate crisis. A good review is Jacoby (1975).
306 The meaning of crisis

values in Departments I and 11. During periods of economic expansion, Department

I grows faster than Department 11. Up to a certain point, capital ‘supplies its own
demand’ which prevents the overproduction of capital.$ This means, however, that
productive capacity expands more rapidly than the ‘consumer power of society’
which increases the possibilities of overproduction of capital. During periods of
economic contraction, Department I declines more rapidly than Department 11.
Up to a certain point, capital ‘demands its own supply’ which prevents the under-
production of capital. This means, however, that productive capacity contracts
faster than society’s consumption power which increases possibilities of under-
production of capital.’
An adequate theory of crisis and account of historical crises in western capitalist
development require more than the identification of logical possibilities of crisis
within the capitalist mode of production. It also requires that we find logical
probabilities of crisis within the problematic of Marx’s theory of capital. In capital
theory, the proximate cause of economic crisis is the falling rate of profit. Cyclical
movements of the profit rate hence cyclical crises are explained in terms of the
uneven development of Departments I and 11. Secular declines in the rate of profit
are deduced from the hypothesized relationship between the value composition of
capital ( C / V , or the ratio of dead to living labour) and the rate of exploitation
( S / V ,or the ratio of surplus to necessary living labour).8 The rate of profit hence
the potential rate of accumulation, i.e., the rate at which surplus value can be
converted into more capital, is defined as S/C+V, or S/C/V+l. This formula in-
dicates that the rate of profit changes directly with the rate of exploitation and
inversely with the composition of ~ a p i t a l . ~
The key variable in the theory of the falling rate of profit is the composition
of capital, which expresses the state of technological progress, capitalist compe-
tition, and in most versions of marxist theory the class struggle. Increases in the
composition of capital and productivity in Marx’s view are associated with in-
creases in C/I/ and s/V , but the increase in the former is greater than the increase
in the latter. ‘The rate of profit does not fall because labor becomes less productive
but because labor becomes more productive”(Marx, edn 1967, 111, 240). Hence,
the rate of profit falls despite the fact that the rate of exploitation (as well as the
mass of surplus value) increases (or at the limit remains constant).
The conditions under which Department I can expand with limited consumer goods markets
was the centre of the debate between Lenin and the Narodniks. The issues involved are dis-
cussed in McFarlane (1970).
’ Makato Itoh (1975, 18) sums up the issue this way: ‘The deep difficulty of treating labour
power as [a] commodity [underlies] the inner contradiction of capital production . . . and
bursts out in periodic crises’.
’ This expression is equivalent to C / V defined as the ratio of constant to variable capital and
S / V defined as the ratio of surplus value to variable capital. C/V+S is sometimes used as the
ratio of dead to living labour on the grounds of greater accuracy.
The value composition of capital and the rate of exploitation are the two main variables in
Marx’s theory of the profit rate. Two secondary, albeit important, variables are the turnover
time of circulating capital, which is related to technological change in transportation and
communications and the speed at which commodities sell, and raw material prices, or the cost
of the elements entering into constant and variable capital.
 James 0 %onnor 307

This line of reasoning, which many marxists apply to the current crisis, requires
some elaboration. Marx’s main point is that while the source of profit is surplus
labour, the connection between the rate of exploitation and rate of profit is an
indirect and fetishized one. The composition of capital mediates the relation be-
tween exploitation and profit hence the relation between the profit rate and
accumulation. According to Marx, capitalist development of the forces of pro-
duction consists of the substitution of dead labour for living labour; the very
definition of progress is that the composition of capital successively rises. This
expresses the basic contradiction of the capitalist system because living labour
alone produces surplus value. ‘It is a contradictory feature of capital’, Ben Fine
writes, ‘that individual profit is pursued by reducing values through relative ex-
pulsion of living labour, which is the source of surplus value, from production
(Fine, 1975,55).
According to Marx, in the course of capitalist development the system loses
its capacity to produce surplus value in sufficient quantities to continue to expand
for two reasons. The first is that there exists an absolute limit on exploitation
given the limit on the length of the working day, the number of workers, and the
size of the average consumption basket (although not the unit value content of
the average consumption basket which theoretically could approach zero). These
limits restrict both the rate and mass of surplus value. The second reason is that
the cost of reproducing constant capital on an expanded scale successively in-
creases. ‘At a high stage of accumulation’, Paul Mattick writes, ‘value demanded
for additional constant capital must have been so great that it finally absorbs all
of the surplus-value. A point must come when the parts of surplus-value to be
used for additional workers and for capitalist consumption must decrease ab-
solutely. This would be the turning point at which the previously latent tendency
to collapse begins to be active’ (Mattick, 1934, 7).l O Put another way, constant
capital finally assumes such a large proportion of total capital that relatively less
of society’s labour time appears as surplus value while more labour time is re-
quired to reproduce constant capital on an expanded scale. Accordingly, in Michael
Lebowitz’s words, ‘the falling rate of profit is an absolute, ultimate barrier which
cannot be surpassed by increases in productivity (relative surplus value) or exten-
sions of the work-day (absolute surplus value). The declining rate o f . . . profit is
a h u t to the production surplus value, a limit immanent in production’ (Lebowitz,
1978,86).
It will be noted that until now nothing has been said about the realization of
profits, only about the production of profits. Marx stresses the importance of the
problem of realizing profits in a famous passage that states ‘the more productive-
ness develops, the more it finds itself at variance with the narrow basis on which
the conditions of consumption rest’ (Marx, edn 1967, 111, 245). This tendency is
reinforced by accelerated obsolescence of fmed capital because of continuous
l o This is Mattick’s critique of the standard marxist thesis that ‘despite the relative expulsion
of living labor from production, and the lack of surplus value relative to capital advanced,
there is but for exceptional circumstances an absolute increase in both surplus value and em-
ployment’ (Marx, edn 1976,111, 56). See also Jacoby (1975).
308 The meaning of crisis

technological change, which forces individual capitals to replace means of pro-

duction before they have transferred all of their embodied value to commodities.
‘Capital needs more and more time to realize the value invested in fixed capital’,
Manuel Castells writes, ‘but allows itself less and less time to do so’ (Castells, 1980,
56). Lebowitz sums up the problem of the relationship between value production
and value realization thus: ‘The drive of capital to expand the production of
surplus value by reducing necessary labour relative to surplus labour and the num-
ber of workers relative to means of production creates barriers to the realization
of capital [as well as the production of capital]. A gap opens up, a gap between
the productive power of society and the consuming power. Rising circulation
time reflects this growing gap; it reflects the difficulty of selling . . . . It is the in-
crease in circulation time which leads to the crisis: “The crisis occurs not only
because the commodity is unsaleable, but because it is not saleable within a par-
ticular period of time”’.’’ In the event that more capital is employed in the sphere
of circulation with the purpose of reducing circulation time to prevent a realiza-
tion crisis, more capital is utilized unproductively, which increases the risk of
underproduction of capital. Poised on the knife edge of crises of overproduction
and underproduction, capital damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t.
Marx stresses that the contradiction between value production and realization
expresses itself in the falling rate of profit. He argues that the tendential law of the
falling rate of profit is a systemic phenomenon. Individual capitalists are assumed
to be blind t o the ways that their uncoordinated, separate actions result in either
overproduction or underproduction of capital hence the falling profit rate origina-
ting in realization and liquidity crises, respectively. The premise is that individual
capitals expect constant or rising profit rates hence steady or increased economic
growth rates. They expand production of means of production and wage goods
accordingly. Additional fixed and circulating capital is produced with the expecta-
tion that other capitals will buy plant, equipment, and raw materials for their
own expansion. Additional wage goods are produced with the expectation that
other capitals will employ more labour power which in turn wiU create an ex-
panded market for wage goods. When the profit rate declines, total profits sooner
or later become too small to permit individual capitals to buy additional constant
capital and employ additional labour power.’ Exactly when this occurs depends
on what values are assigned to the key variables in the model of accumulation.
The result is an unplanned expansion of inventories of means of production and
wage goods destined to expand the economy’s productive capacity and to feed,
house, and clothe an expanded work force, a wave of general pessimism, an econo-
mic turning point or crisis, and contraction. ‘The anarchy of capitalist production
11
‘2
Lebowitz (1978,90) quoting Theories of surplus value III (London, 1952).
The distinction between effective demand for replacement means of production and sub-
sistence and demand for additional means of production and wage goods is ignored in the most
thorough attack on the falling profit rate theory to date, which weakens the critique consider-
ably. ‘It is at least possible that the rate of profit may become so low that capitalists lose any
incentive to accumulate and, thereby, generate a lack of demand for means of production as
well as (via a fall in the level of employment) for means of subsistence’ (Van Parijs, 1980, 9).
 James O’Connor 309

makes crisis possible’, Ben Fine writes, summing up the issue, ‘but the falling rate
of profit makes it inevitable. This is because a crisis is the social outcome of the
interaction of pessimistic capitalists’ individual decisions, whereas a falling rate
of profit is the social outcome that makes these decisions certain’ (Fine, 1975,
58).
Many attempts have been made by marxist and non-marxist economists to
refute the tendential law of the falling rate of profit on the grounds that its pre-
mise is unrealistic and/or that it is logically confusing or inconsistent.13 The most
common argument against the falling rate of profit theory is that capitalist invest-
ment in fixed capital actually increases the technical composition of capital, or
C/L where C is total constant capital and L is total employment, not the value
composition of capital, or C/V where C is total constant capital and V is L / v
or total employment in relation to the value of labour power per unit of employ-
ment. The claim is that increases in the technical composition of capital, or a rise
in the amount of machinery per worker (or a general increase in physical pro-
ductivity per worker), may or may not increase the value composition. It is ad-
mitted that, everything else being the same, if u falls or remains unchanged, a rise
in C/L necessarily increases C/V (or C / L / v ) .But everything else may not be the
same. A technical innovation which increases C/L may reduce the value of means
of production in relation to means of subsistence (i.e., wage goods) hence lowering
C/V. In principle, this criticism is well taken. In practice, it is unrealistic because
capitalism’s drive to lower the value of wage goods is the mechanism which permits
the standard of living of the working class to rise and at the same time the rate of
exploitation to increase. The argument that technical change reduces the value of
means of production in relation to the means of subsistence fails to grasp what
Marx argued was an inherent quality of the capitalist mode of production.
A related argument is that technological change embodied in new means of
production may not even result in an increase in C/L or the technical composition
of capital. The claim is that there is no reason to expect that C/L will increase if
technological change is ‘capital-saving’ as well as ‘lab~ur-saving’.~~ It is true that
examples of ‘capital-saving’ innovations can be found in the economic history of
the west. It is also true, however, that ‘capital-saving’ investments have the ulti-
mate effect of lowering the value of labour power, i.e., the cost of producing the
average consumption basket. In fact, technical change in capitalism is governed

13 Van Parijs (1980). In the interests of brevity and clarity, I ignore the arguments against
Marx’s profit theory which confuse marxist and neeRicardian theory (i.e., which mix up
profit strictly defined and ‘profit’ arising when individual capitals get a jump on their com-
petitors via cost-cutting innovations - ‘profits’ which are actually a form of rent) and con-
centrate on ‘classical’ marxist arguments and counterarguments.
14 Mandel’s answer to this is that new equipment ‘must be constructed with preexistent
machinery and pre-given techniques, and its own wlue is thus determined by present labour
productivity . . . and since this equipment cannot be mass-produced in the initial stages’ the
assumption (which is needed to make the criticism valid) that productivity growth in Depart-
ment I is more rapid than in the economy as a whole is not tenable (Mandel, 1975, 202-203).
Mandel could strengthen his case by adding that technical change designed to raise produc-
tivity in Department I1 may not increase productivity in Department I at all.
3 10 The meaning of crisis

first and foremost by the need to expel living labour from production, which
normally lowers the value of the average consumption basket, and only secon-
danly by the need to economize on constant capital. This need is thought to be
inherent in the capitalist mode of production because of capitalist competition
and class struggle, and, in this sense, technical change effecting an increase in the
value of means of production in relation to the means of subsistence of the work-
ing class is ‘overdetermined’. The counterargument is that if C/V is very large,
capitalists have that much more incentive to economize on constant capital. How-
ever, a large C/V is historically associated with a developed and organized working
class which exercises structural power over wages, hours, and working conditions.
This means that capital has that much more incentive to expel living labour and
raise C/ V further.
Still another argument against the falling profit rate theory is that an increase
in the technical composition of capital may reduce the costs of raw materials,
fuel, and other elements of constant capital with the result that the tendency of
the rate of profit to fall is inhibited or even r e ~ e r s e d . ’New
~ mining machinery,
for example, will cheapen raw materials. However, cheap raw materials or circu-
lating capital indirectly find their way into the average working-class consumption
basket. New mining machinery cheapens coal which lowers the value of many
wage goods. Whether new machlnery or techniques reduce the value of means of
production more or less than the value of wage goods depends to a degree on the
technical characteristics of the raw materials, fuels, etc., themselves. Certain kinds
of hardening metals are useful only in Department I; oil is utilized simultaneously
in Departments I and 11; etc. The mass of raw materials, however, are normally
used in both Departments. Moreover, materials used exclusively in Department
I indirectly lower the value of the average consumption basket. To assume other-
wise is to assume away social reproduction in general and the relationship between
Department I and I1 in particular.
It seems safe to conclude therefore that the major, if not the only, case in which
the value composition of capital is likely to remain the same or fall with any
given increase in the technical composition or reduction in the cost of the elements
of constant capital is when v increases. But a basic article of faith in traditional
marxist theory is that increases in the technical composition of capital by defmi-
tion cancel any increases in v. The bottom line of marxist theory is that the average
consumption basket can only rise when its value content declines, i.e., only when
15
Marx himself argued that as capital expels more living labour from production, the tendency
of the falling profit rate will assert itself sooner or later (Marx, edn 1967, 111, 233). Phillip
Armstrong writes that Marx ‘gives no reason why the cheapening of the elements of constant
capital could not permanently prevent the rate of profit from falling’ (Armstrong, 1975, 4).
Harris also sounds the warning that ‘a problem arises when we take into account the fact that
an increasing mass of means of production is usually accompanied by a decreasing value of
commodities including the elements of constant capital. In that case, the increasing mass may
or may not be offset by the decreasing value. This leaves the direction of change ambiguous’
(pers. comm. 1 March 1980). I am grateful to Professor Harris for helping me turn an intuitive
approach to some of the problems dealt with in this section into a more analytically rigorous
approach.
 James O’Connor 3 11

the system produces the consumption basket at less cost. It may be concluded
that a rise in the value composition of capital normally but not inevitably accom-
panies an increase in technical composition presupposing the conditions of social
reproduction of labour power remain unchanged, that is, that the size of the
average consumption basket multiplied by its average value content either falls
or remains the same. These lines of reasoning strengthen the view that the rate
of profit is likely to fall because of the rise in the value composition of capital,
hence the view that economic crisis is logically probable (not merely logically
possible) in the process of capitalist accumulation. In the course of a capitalist
boom, a critical point is reached when C/V increases sharply while S / V remains
constant or declines owing to labour shortages and the wage struggle. The result
is an ‘absolute overproduction of capital’ followed by a ‘steep and sudden fall
in the general rate of profit’. The subsequent crisis consists of a drying up of
possibilities of profitably exploiting labour, which leads to a fall in production,
layoffs, reduced wages and wage spending, etc. The greater the increase in C/V
during the boom and the higher the level of employment and lower the rate of
exploitation, the more sudden and extensive are layoffs and other crisis features.16
As we have seen, traditional marxist theory holds that increases in the technical
composition of capital (C/L) increase the value composition ( C / L / v )by reducing
v. This is another way of saying that rises in the technical composition of capital
increase the rate of exploitation (assuming the size of the consumption basket
remains unchanged or grows at a relatively slow rate and that hours of work remain
unchanged or fall at a relatively slow rate). The increase in the rate of exploitation
obviously moderates the adverse effect of the rise in the value composition of
capital on the rate of profit. In effect, the capitalist system takes surplus value
out of one of the capitalist’s pockets and replaces more or less the same amount
in another pocket. In terms of capital production, the rate of profit musr fall
only when the size of the average consumption basket increases more rapidly than
the decline in its value content or when its value content as well as absolute size
increases. This line of analysis presupposes, however, that there exists no structural
gap between value production and value realization. But the essence of capitalism
is precisely the contradiction between the production and realization of values and
surplus value. Hence, sooner or later in the course of capitalist accumulation, the
realized or actual profit rate must decline whether the value content or size of the
consumption basket rises or falls. On the one side, if the value content and/or
size of the consumption basket declines, the actual rate of profit will fall because
of overproduction of capital. If capital is used unproductively to shorten circula-
tion time, more capital becomes in effect constant capital. On the other side, if
the value content and/or size of the consumption basket increases sufficiently,
the actual rate of profit wdl fall because of underproduction of capital. In sum,
‘the decline in the rate of profit is the way in which the contradiction between
production and circulation of capital expresses itself, Michael Lebowitz writes. ‘It
is no more possible to eliminate from Marx’s argument the tendency for the rate of
profit to fall than it is to eliminate the sphere of circulation’ (Lebowitz, 1978,90).

16 For a sharp discussion of these and related issues, see Armstrong (1975).
3 12 The meeting of crisis

111 Structural functions of economic crisis

According to modern social-scientific principles, theories of the historical origins

of social processes cannot also serve as explanations of the historical functions of
these processes without the risk of confusing individual will formation and action
with ‘system’ will formation, which according to traditional marxism in capitalism
is necessarily unplanned and uncontrolled. The same warning applies to theories
of the structural origins and functions of economic crisis in the capitalist mode of
production. The claim that the contradiction between value production and rea-
lization and falling profit rate constitutes the source of economic crisis cannot be
appropriated to show that economic crises function to resolve this contradiction
and in some systemic manner increase the profit rate.
The reason is that the process of crisis-resolution is qualitative as well as quanti-
tative. The course of any crisis including its eventual outcome depends not only
on certain adjustments in the quantitative relationships between the main variables
in the model of accumulation but also on ‘adjustments’ in the capital-labour rela-
tionship within the circuits of capital, social life, and politically. In marxist theory,
capitalist accumulation per se is understood as a qualitative as well as quantitative
process. Marx drives home the point time and again that accumulation consists
not merely of the expansion of capitalist wealth but also of the development of a
capitalistic labour process, not to speak of other forms of capital restructuring such
as concentration and centralization of capital, industrial relocation, uneven develop-
ment, etc. Marx argues that these kinds of qualitative changes do not occur regular-
ly or smoothly. They require periodic ruptures in the circuits of capital, or periodic
and structural crises. ‘A crisis always forms the starting point of large new invest-
ments’, Marx writes (edn 1967, 11, 186). Crises are the occasions for the necessary
introduction of new production methods; takeovers and mergers between capital
units; reorganization of labor markets including the forms in which labour power
presents itself to capital; industrial relocation; etc. Crises are external, objective
forces which compel capital to reorganize itself to prepare for new rounds of
capital accumulation. In this sense, qualitative changes in the forms of capital
during crises and depressions turn into quantitative changes during recoveries and
booms, which sooner or later selfdestruct hence forcing more qualitative change.
Quality changes into quantity which changes back into quality.” ‘Without contra
diction, no movement; without the falling rate of profit, no innovation, no rising
productivity of labour’ (Lebowitz, 1978,93). A crucial point of departure between
bourgeois economics and marxism, therefore is that within the latter tradition
there is general agreement that capitalism is not only crisis-ridden but also crisis-
I7
Thus it can be argued that Marx utilized the models of expanded reproduction in Cclpitul
I1 not only to clarify the relationships between Departments I and I1 as most Marx scholars
claim, but also to lay a basis for analysing quantitative changes during economic expansions.
In Capital I , Marx presents accumulation of capital as qualitative changes in production. In
Copiful II accumulation is presented as quantitative changes in circulation, i.e. growth of
exchange value or total revenues. This in my view is why the reproduction models are found
in volume II.
 James O’Connor 3 13

dependent.I8 Capital accumulates through crises which become the cauldrons in

which capital qualitatively reorganizes itself for future economic expansion.
There is disagreement within the marxist tradition about the nature of the
connections between structural sources and function of crisis, i.e., about the
mechanisms which restore conditions of profitable accumulation. The general
disagreement concerns the relationshp between crisis theory and the so-called
offsetting tendencies to the falling rate of profit, i.e., cheapening of raw materials;
manipulation of terms of trade; industrial relocation; wage cuts below the value
of labour power; and increased intensity of work. Most marxists argue that the
function of these offsetting tendencies is to postpone economic crises; some claim
that these tendencies function specifically to resolve crises. In other words, do
these tendencies ameliorate the contradiction between value production and
realization during periods of economic expansion or do they resolve this contra-
diction during crises, or both? It is clear that all five offsetting tendencies are
crisis-resolving agents insofar as capital deploys them to resolve the contradiction
between value production and reali~ati0n.l~It may he argued, for example, that
imperialist manipulations of the terms of trade not only tend to prevent crises but
also to resolve crises it cannot prevent.
It may also be argued that capital’s most powerful ‘crisis-fix’ is the expanded
reserve army of labour and the reorganization of the labour market and labour
power itself, which permit wage cuts and speed-up. What is clear is that the most
important form of crisis-induced capital restructuring - restructuring the means
of production - is not included in Capital as an offsetting tendency. Neither is
the process of state intervention in the reorganization of capital, which some
marxists believe to be the crucial factor in contemporary crisis-resolution (while
others believe that capital basically restructures itself through the mechanisms
of the world market and control of the labour process).
It will pay to address these issues one at a time. The first is the role of the
reserve army of labour and reorganization of labour markets and the form of
labour power in the process of crisis resolution. In Capital, Marx calls the reserve
army the ‘lever of capital accumulation’. He meant that a reserve labour force
has to be available during economic booms to permit particular spheres of the
economy to expand ‘without injury to the scale of production in other spheres
(Marx, edn 1967, I, 632). In another passage, Marx writes that the reserve army
also ‘regulates the wage rate’. These passages together mean that the reserve army
functions to maintain stable wage rates during periods of economic expansion.

18
The only major bourgeois economists who dealt with the problem of the capitalist cycle
and crises in a serious way were Joseph Schumpeter and Wesley Mitchell (some would add
J.M.Keynes, who in my view remained an ‘equilibrium’ theorist). They were also two of
the very few economists who emphasized qualitative changes in the process of growth. Schum-
peter stressed ‘creative destruction’ as the engine of growth (modern ecological economists
call this ‘destructive creation’). Mitchell stressed the role of depressions in stimulating the
rationalization of production processes (Mitchell, 1927; 1963).
l9 It is in this latter sense that Catley (1975) uses the concepts of offsetting tendencies. The
great majority of marxist economists use the concepts in the former sense.
3 14 The meaning of crisis

The question arises, what role does the reserve army play during periods of econo-
mic crisis and contraction? Does the recreation of a reserve labour force permit
wage cuts and speed-up, and hence increase the rates of exploitation and profit,
thus functioning as a ‘lever of accumulation’. Maurice Dobb suggests that this is
the case when he argues that it is precisely working-class economic strength during
economic booms which causes crisis. ‘From the standpoint of capital’, he writes,
‘progress is arrested and crises occur, because wages are “too high” . . . ’20 The
tide that leads to fortune is the ebb tide of crisis and contraction which recreates
the reserve army and lowers wages hence restoring conditions for profitable accu-
mulation.
Most marxists, however, argue that the reserve army of labour, wage reductions,
and speed-up are of secondary importance. ‘The crisis derives from the necessity
for a fundamental restructuring of productive capital’, Fine and Harris write,
‘ . . . high . . . unemployment does not basically result from the need of distribu-
tional struggle (although this plays a secondary, related role) but from the need
for a break in the circuit of capital to release money, means of production and
labour-power, so that they can, at a later stage of the cycle when the expansion of
capital’s circuit is renewed, be reemployed in a circuit based on a restructuring of
productive capital’ (Fine and Harris, 1976, 112).21 According to this view, capi-
talism needs successively greater capital concentration and centralization and a
more capitalistic labour process and the crucial mechanism is the process of crisis-
induced restructuring of means of production.
The basic premise of this argument is that crisis reduces the value of constant
capital without impairing its physical productivity. The decline in the value com-
position of capital without a concomitant decline in its technical composition
will, of course, raise the profit rate. The argument continues that subsequent
capital restructuring redistributes surplus value to fewer capitals meanwhile in-

’’ ‘What was to prevent capital accumulation, with the increasing demand for labour which it
engendered, from raising the wage-level until surplus-value disappeared, so that capitalism of
its own momentum should extinguish the class inequality of which it was reared? . . . . The
crucial factor which operated here - according t o Marx’s theory the defensive mechanism by
which the system inhibited its own selfextinction - consisted in the double reaction whereby
the industrial reserve army was periodically recruited: the tendency of capitalist economy to
have a bias towards ‘labour-saving’ changes and the tendency for accumulation to be retarded
and investment to recoil when signs of any appreciable fall in the rate of profit appeared. On
the one hand, this intensive recruitment of a labour-reserve . . . and, on the other hand, the
extensive recruitment of new labour-supplies by increase in population, by proletarianization
of intermediate social strata, or by extension of investment in virgin colonial areas, were the
factors which operated continually to depress the price of labour-power to a level which per-
mitted surplus-value to be earned. . . . From the standpoint of capital, accordingly, progress
is arrested and crises occur, because wages are “too high” . . . ’ (Dobb, 1937, 127-28). Dobb
avoids the charge that his crisis theory is merely a modem version of Adam Smith’s thesis that
the falling profit rate is due to a high wage/profit squeeze by adding that ‘such a statement
is. of course, strictly relative to the assumption that a certain minimum return on capital is
“necessary”, and only retains any meaning in this context. Rather it is true to say that crises
occur because profit and interest are too high; since such a statement draws attention to the
fundamental fact that, by comparison with a system of “social production”, “the real barrier
of capitalist production is capital itself”.
 James 0 ’Connor 3 15

creasing efficiency, which further raises the profit rate. The Phasing out of un-
profitable capitals and the increase in efficiency of surviving capitals occur in two
ways. First, the ‘normal process’ of crisis-induced bankruptcy or business failure
reallodates existing surplus value to fewer and more productive capitals, hence
raising the rate of exploitation and average profitability. Second, the buying up or
absorption of weaker capitals by more productive capitals has a similar effect.
It is also widely believed that capital restructuring in contemporary capitalism
means the relocation of industry on a wider geographical scale as well as restruc-
turing of means of production. Industrial relocation supposedly raises the average
rate of profit in three ways. First, the geographical expansion of industry permits
capital to exploit a widening circle of reserve labour which in turn is the result of
the industrialization of the countryside or capitalization of agriculture. The argu-
ment is that capitalist efficiency increases with the development of the social
division of labour, e.g., when certain regions specialize in administration, finance,
research and development, and related activities while others specialize in basic
or light industry. Second, industrial relocation inhibits worker migration to older
industrial centres. This keeps the working class divided geographically and prevents
new workers from getting access to high wages in the older industrial regions
and also reduces demands on the welfare state in the imperialist countries. Third,
industry typically relocates to regions with authoritarian governments which are
ready to help finance new investments and also prevent the development of bcal
workers’ movements.
Putting these lines of analysis together suggests that crisis-induced recreation of
the reserve army of labour is a lever of accumulation to the degree that it is a lever
of ‘capital restructuring’. This means that layoffs during the early stages of econo-
mic crises permit capital to reestablish its domination over the working class which
in turn is a socjal and political precondition for restructuring the means of produc-
tion and relocating industry. Concentration and centralization of capital, increases
in productive efficiency, and industrial relocation in turn generate more unem-

Howell adds another argument. It is possible, he writes, to explain a decline in the profit
rate by an increase in the V / C , hence a decrease in S / V if the entire wage fund is considered to
be variable capital. His answer to this view is that because S / V is so high there develops the un-
productive ‘luxury’ Department IIB with its own wage fund. Moreover, unproductive realiza-
tion labour is paid wages which should not be included in variable capital. For these reasons,
V is smaller than the total wage fund. He then argues that luxuries (Department IIB) do not
enter into the consumption of the working class, hence play no role in the determination of
the value of labour power. Hence, a rise in C/V in Department IIB will accelerate the tendency
for the profit rate to fall, not inhibit it. He adds that a reduction in V in Department IIB
through the rise in C/V reduces the mass of surplus value and hence reduces the profit rate.
In sum, his argument is that the overall tendency for the increase in C / V to raise S / V and
reduce the profit rate is accelerated because Department IIB output is not part of the value of
labour power. The falling profit rate, therefore, means a big reduction in demand for Depart-
ment IIA output which does enter into the value of labour power. Department IIB plays a
crucial role in the crisis because when demand for its output falls, unemployment rises, re-
ducing the demand for consumer necessities produced in Department IIA (pp. 63, 65, 66).
This whole line of analysis, of course, assumes that Department IIB expands on the basis of
surplus value produced elsewhere and also that Department IIB output does not enter into the
value of labour power.
3 16 The meaning of crisis

ployment. This means that in subsequent short or long-term economic expansions

an even larger reserve army is available to throw into production. It is not the
original layoffs, therefore, but the ‘second round’ unemployment which is the
result of ‘capital restructuring’ which theoretically makes the next boom possible
without excessive upward pressures on wage rates. In this sense, the reserve army is
the key to restructuring means of production and also the system’s capacity to
enter into a new phase of expansion. This seems to be especially true today when
there is a restructuring of the work force through changes in education, labour
recruitment, collective bargaining systems, welfare, etc., which change the form
in w h c h labour power presents itself, or which shape labour power in ways which
satisfy capital’s needs (see, for example, Deitch, 1973,498).
In recent years, marxist economists have disagreed about the relative importance
of economic and political factors in the process of capital restructuring (understood
to include the restructuring of labour markets and labour power). On one side there
is the traditional argument that market forces themselves are sufficient to force
capital to reorganize itself during crises. This is not supposed to occur in the classi-
cal way which Marx himself described, i.e., through price deflation, including
deflation of the value content of constant capital which reduces the organic com-
position of capital and increases the rate of profit. This version is obviously un-
realistic in a world of oligopolistic corporations and permanent inflation. It is
thought to occur through the credit system and stock market. Overextension of
credit during preceding booms result in rising debt/equity ratios which in turn
cause periodic liquidity crises, business failures, and consolidation of larger capita-
list enterprises. This process of purging weaker capitals occurs without any need
for political intervention.” At the same time, the willingness of big capitalist
and institutional investors to supply money capital to big capitalist firms alone is
greater during crises. The so-called two-tier stock market starves smaller enter-
prises of ~ a p i t a l . ’ ~The resulting ‘passive destruction’ of inefficient capitals raises
average efficiency and the average rate of profit in the economy as a whole. On
the other side, there is the argument that the accumulation process today is not
‘self-regulating’ in the traditional sense, and that the system’s capacity to resecure
favourable profit conditions is dependent on political means and legitimations and
state planning.24
2z Marx’s view was that ‘credit accelerates the violent eruptions of this contradiction - crises
- and thereby .
the elements of disintegration of the old mode of production . . . The credit
system appears as the main level of overproduction and overspeculation in commerce solely
because the reproduction process, which is elastic by nature, is here forced to its extreme limits,
and is so forced because a larger part of the social capital is employed by people who do not
.
own it and who consequently tackle things quite differently than the owner . . . This simply
.
demonstrates the fact that the self-expansion of capital . . . permits an actual free develop-
ment only up to a certain point, so that in fact it constitutes an immanent fetter and barrier
to production, which is continually broken through by the credit system’ (edn 1967, 111,
441). In other words, credit plays a greater role in crisis-creation than crisis-resolution.
p 3 ‘Can US industry find the money it needs?’ Business Week 22 September 1973.
24 This is not to deny that state credit and money policies; policies which establish the rules
of the game in the stock market; manpower and investment policies; etc., and especially war
have been an essential element in capital restructuring in the past.
 James O’Connor 3 17

N Economic crisis, social disintegration, working-class revolution

In traditional marxist theory, crisis-induced capital restructuring is not certain to
restore profitable conditions of accumulation. First, capital’s own self-healing
powers may be too weak. Second, capital restructuring is a qualitative as well as
quantitative process which includes unemployment, changes in the labour process
unfavourable to labour, social disruption, bankruptcy, and so one. Hence, economic
crises stimulate different kinds of social movements and worlung-class struggles. In
effect, economic sysrem disintegration causes social disintegration. Crises become
cauldrons not only of capital restructuring but also of reformist, revolutionary,
and counterrevolutionary political mcvements, including fascism (see, for example,
Sinclair, 1976). In this way, traditional marxism modifies the medical model of
crisis and raises possibilities not only of a restoration of capital’s normal powers,
but also of revolutionary social and political transformation. This view parallels
the ‘tradition of tragic theater, in which the perilous moment of crisis is eternal,
[which] exemplifies this sense of crisis as moments which present rich possibilities
for the regaining of free subjectivity against the pseudo-power of Fate’ (Keane,
1979, 184-85).2s
The view that capitalism develops according to its own inner logic or laws of
motion, but that general economic crisis creates possibilities for social transforma-
tion, was advanced by Marx himself, subsequently misunderstood by Karl Kaut-
skyz6 and German Social Democracy, refined by Lenin and Bolshevik theory, and
is kept alive today by traditionalists such as Ernest Mande1.l’ The ‘objectivist’
Marx wrote that ‘in view of the general prosperity which now prevails there can be
no question of any real revolution. A new revolution will be made possible only
as a result of a new crisis’.z8 Kautsky and many others misinterpreted this and
similar remarks in the sense that Marx was referring to bourgeois revolution which
was unlikely to occur in good economic times. In Marx’s political theory, the pro-
letarian revolution comes only with the failure of the bourgeois revolution, or its
success together with its refusal to ‘go all the way’. Marx did not and could not
write anything meaningful about proletarian revolution per se because he died well
before the full development of the modern working-class and salariat. Lenin was
more or less in the same boat. The crucial point in leninist doctrine is that ‘sub-
jective processes’ of working-class consciousness and will formation are important
only insofar as economic crises create mass militancy, which becomes the social

zs Keane adds that in Rousseauian thought crisis ‘raises the possibility that man can be re-
made in the image of their true selves’ (p. 185).
26 ‘The history of mankind is determined, not by the ideas of man, but by the economic
development which precedes irresistably obedient to certain underlying laws and not according
to the whims and wishes of people’ (Kautsky, 1904,34).
1 7 E.G. Mandel (1979). ‘Mandel . . . makes a fairly sharp penetration between the economic
dynamics of capitalist economies and the political impact of tendencies and shifts in the force
of “class struggle”’ (Gordon, 1979,438).
Keane (1979, 186) citing a post Communist Manifesto article by Marx in Neue Rheinische
Zeitung.
3 18 The meaning of crisis

material which the Party politically organizes to challenge the capitalist state. In
this view, crises themselves remain objective, external forces which deprive both
capital and labour of their normal powers, while the Party organizes and embodies
workingclass resistance and subjectivity. The Party supplies the theoretical analysis
of capitalist economy and society, which is ‘undoubtedly the revolutionary praxis
par e x c e l l e n ~ e ’and,
~ ~ on the basis of the subsequent ‘reform of consciousness’,
organizes revolutionary political struggle. The Party in essence intervenes in his-
torical processes which otherwise ‘work themselves out’ in ways which restore
conditions of capitalist accumulation.
The ideas of crisis as ‘historical objectivity’ and the Party as ‘organized sub-
jectivity’ may be plausible when the working class is undeveloped or half-formed,
which creates the political space for an iron-willed ‘parent-surrogate’ Party. How-
ever, the traditional Leninist model of crisis, consciousness, Party, and revolution
is both voluntaristic and deterministic. The model suffers from voluntarism because
it offers no real theory of historical conjunctures which permits the Party to grasp
real as opposed to imaginary revolutionary possibilities (Beilharz, 1979).30 This
failure is rooted in a lack of understanding of the contradictory nature of worker
struggles in the past in general, and of the problem of working-class composition/
recomposition in particular.
Leninism suffers from determinism because (as Beilharz reminds us) it makes
a deterministic connection between crisis and consciousness, and another determin-
istic connection between consciousness and Party-building. As one commentator
states the thesis, in periods of mass unemployment and impoverishment, ‘the pro-
letariat could only realize their immediate interests by abandoning them and
strugghng for their real interests, the abolition of capitalist production relation^'.^'
In the words of another, in bad times ‘when the worker comprehends that under
capitalist production he is degraded to the status of a mere object, of a commodity,
he ceases to be a commodity, an object, and becomes a subject’ (Avineri, 1971,
148).
The idea that workers suddenly change from a collection of individuals who
sell labour power in the market to a social and political class which abolishes the
market for labour power raises a crucial question. How do the workers know that
they can realize their economic interests only by abandoning them for revolu-
29 Sholomo Avineri (1971, 149). Marx himself wrote that ‘it is clear that the arm of criticism
cannot replace the criticism of arms. Material force can only be over-thrown by material force;
but theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses’ (quoted in Avineri,
1971, 139).
3 0 The problem of ’voluntarism’ doubtless was the main factor giving rise to the theory of
economic breakdown or collapse, which Rosa Luxemburg considered to be the ‘cornerstone of
scientific socialism’. Without economic crisis and ultimate capitalist breakdown, socialism
‘ceases to be objectively necessary’. As has been often pointed out, there are definite religious
aspects to this kind of thinking. The theory itself is supposedly scientific insofar as it dis-
covered and obeyed historical laws; it is religious in the sense that communists accepted these
laws on faith. ‘Some say the writings of Rosa Luxemburg will evoke the same kind of devotion
as those of Saint Teresa of Avila’ (Jod Madtiegui quoted in Baines, 1972, 110).
’ I Review of Herbert Marcuse, Counter revolution and revolr, Boston, 1972, Telos 13 (Fall,
1972), 149.
 James O’Connor 3 19

tionary political action? This question has been answered in various unsatisfactory
ways. Karl Korsch’s solution to the problem of working-class consciousness lay in
the analysis of the relationship between bourgeois thought and marxist theory. He
argued that one condition for the accumulation of capital and capitalist society
generally is the general acceptance in the society of ‘pre-scientific and bourgeois-
scientific consciousness’ (Korsch, 1970, 78). In this view, capitalist relations of
production cannot exist without hegemonic capitalist thought. According to
Korsch, dialectical marxism is characterized by the ‘coincidence of consciousness
and reality’. A ‘major component of a theory of social revolution’ is the marxist
critique of bourgeois science and consciousness. By laying bare the reality of
capitalism and exploding bourgeois truths, marxist theory creates a rupture be-
tween reality and consciousness, and hence permits changes in material reality.
In this way, Korsch explained the failure of revolution by claiming that it was
impossible for the workers’ movement to assimilate marxist theory because of the
disjuncture between the theory itself, which was based on mid nineteenth-century
working-class practice, and late nineteenth-century proletarian practice.
George Lucaks also stressed the importance of the ‘reform of consciousness’
when he argued that the working class adopts a revolutionary class consciousness
only when it becomes self-conscious of its actual activity and the results of this
activity. But this does not occur spontaneously because commodity relationships
are too pervasive and bourgeois hegemony is too totalizing. Certain that reform
is more difficult during crisis periods because ‘the crisis-ridden condition of capi-
talism makes it increasingly difficult to relieve the pressure from the proletariat
by making minute concessions’ Lucaks was equally certain that an ‘ideological
crisis of the proletariat . . . manifests itself on the one hand in the fact that the
objectively extremely precarious position of bourgeois society is endowed in the
minds of the workers with all its erstwhile stability and in many respects the
proletariat is still caught up in the old capitalist forms of thought and feeling’
(Lucaks, 1971, 310). The solution is the Party, the task of which is not only to
develop and disseminate the theory of capitalism and crisis but also politically to
lead the working-class struggle. The subjective conditions for revolutionary pro-
letarian consciousness revolve around the development and dissemination of Marx’s
theory of capital and Party-building. The objective conditions for revolutionary
consciousness consist of crisis hardships, during which there occurs an upsurge of
spontaneous activity by the masses. In Hobsbawm’s words, ‘structure and situation
interact, and determine the limits of decision and action; but what determines the
possibilities of action is the primary situation. At this point the analysis of forces
capable of mobilizing, organizing, and moving into action groups of people on a
politically decisive scale (e.g., the Leninist Party), becomes relevant’ (Hobsbawm,
1975,12).
Western marxism took another turn with the failure of the worker uprisings of
the 1920s. The Dutch Council Communists (Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter)
explained the failure of revolution not in terms of ‘wrong’ objective conditions but
rather in terms of the deep dependence of the working class on bourgeois institu-
320 The meaning of crisis

tions such as the press, schools, church, etc. Antonio Gramsci, of course, developed
the idea of bourgeois ideological hegemony and the problems this posed for the
working-class movement more profoundly than anyone else. At one stage in his
career, even Lucaks argued that all bourgeois institutions should be in effect boy-
cotted because active participation would reproduce reified bourgeois thought and
sensibilities within the proletariat. Some marxist theorists argued the extreme
position that workers needed to engage in participatory struggles not only in work,
community, and cultural fields, but also within the leninist vanguard parties them-
selves - an idea which Lenin ruthlessly criticized in Left wing communism: an
infantile disorder (1920), but which has survived in elaborated forms of criticism-
self-criticism and struggles against sexism, racism, national chauvinism, and elitism
in revolutionary organizations today.

V ‘Neomarxist’crisis theory

Twentieth century historiography and social theory have conspired to weaken or

destroy traditional marxist concepts of crisis and consciousness, rebellion and
Party organization, reform and revolution. At the level of economic and political
struggle, ‘the idea of a standard revolutionary situation in which an economic
catastrophe raises the desperate and rootless poor against their betters . . . has
probably disappeared forever . , . economic crises are only likely to stimulate
rebellion under very special circumstances: when they place the powerful in the
position of withholding or extracting resources from organized groups of persons
who have established claims on these resources’ (Lees and TiUy, 1972, 4). At the
level of theory, the methodological premises of traditional leninism have been
shown to be unsound. ‘Critical theory’ argued convincingly that work and material
existence are only one mediation between human beings and their environment.
Adorno and Horkheimer in particular showed that human consciousness has a
constitutive role in the construction of social reality, hence that human emancipa-
tion cannot be based solely or even mainly on ‘objective’ economic conditions
and roles. The connections between economic crisis, consciousness, and social
action are in fact mediated by social concepts at different levels of human exper-
ience. The word ‘crisis’ is soaked with social, political, and cultural meanings.
One basic reason is the fusion of economic processes and normative-cultural
and political processes characteristic in ‘political capitalism’ and the modern ‘social
factory’, in which science, art, family, and culture generally are deeply implicated
in the process of capitalist accumulation. This interpenetration of economy,poli-
tics, and culture obliterates the traditional distinction between ‘objective economic
laws’, ‘political subjectivity’, and ‘cultural life’.
Jurgen Habermas has been the most outspoken neomarxist exponent of this
view that ‘the laws of the economic system are no longer identical to those ana-
lyzed by Marx’ because of ‘interference from the political system’ hence creating
the need for a new theory of the ‘interaction of economic, politics, and culture’
 James 0 ’Connor 32 1

(Bolaffi, 1979, 168). In his work, Legitimation crisis, Habermas states that ‘to
conceive of a process as a crisis is tacitly to give it normative meaning - the reso-
lution of the crisis affects a liberation of the subject caught up in it’. As we saw,
in traditional marxism ‘subject’ means ‘capital’ understood as a systemic historical
process. ‘Liberation’ therefore means successful crisis-induced capital restructuring
and the restoration of conditions of capitalist accumulation. Traditionally, ‘subject’
also means ‘working class’ understood as self-conscious, organized, and combative
human subjectivity during economic crises. ‘Liberation’ in this sense means social
and political revolution. Liberation construed in this way means not only freedom
from the pain and suffering which are invariably associated with c r i ~ e s , ~but
’ also
liberation from passivity and powerlessness, threats to individual’s social identity,
and loss of what it is possible to accept in a matter-of-fact way. These latter mean-
ings of crisis as an ‘ordeal’ underwrite a neomarxist concept of working-class libera-
tion because powerlessness, lack of identity, and absence of what can be taken for
granted are normal conditions of working-class life, which crises merely exacerbate.
Liberation from the pain and suffering of unemployment, economic insecurity,
low wages, etc., alone can be effected, however temporarily, precisely by the
restoration of capital‘s ‘normal sovereignty’, i.e. renewal of profitable accumulation
conditions.
Habermas demonstrates in a convincing way that working-class liberation de-
fined in terms of social identity, social practice, and social power cannot be dis-
cussed intelligently within the framework of the theory of capitalist accumulation
defined as a variety of ‘systems theory’, however dialectical its method and however
sharp the difference between bourgeois systems theory and marxism. ‘Systems are
not presented as subject’, Habermas writes, rejecting the objectivist viewpoint of
systems theory, ‘but . . . only subjects can be involved in crises . . . only when
members of society experience structural alterations as critical for continued
existence and feel their social identity threatened can we speak of crises. Distur-
bances of system integration endanger continued exirtence only to the extent that
social integration is at stake, that is, when the consensual foundations of normative
structures are so much impaired that society becomes anomic. Crisis states assume
the form of the disintegration of social institutions’ (Habermas, 1975, 3, italics
added).33
Habermas’s radicalized Durkheimian approach to crisis theory distinguishes
between system integration and social integration and in this sense is a radical
improvement on traditional marxist objectivism and determinism. System inte-
gration occurs when system functions are integrated into one another. Social
integration exists when individuals are normatively integrated into particular
functions and hence fulfd expected social roles. Orthodox marxist theories of

Sennett (1977, 171).

’’ This is echoed by John Keane who writes that ‘the truth 6f the old crisis theorum remains,
the renewal of subjectivity continues to depend on the decay of this system’s objective struc-
ture and signification’ (Keane, 1979, 188). This is also echoed by Daniel Bell (1979) who
stresses not social institutional disintegration but the absence of any deep-rooted morality or
belief system which is thought to threaten capitalism’ssurvival most profoundly.
322 The meaning of crisis

economic crisis defined as systemic ruptures in the circuits of capital exemplify

system disintegration. These occur when there is insufficient money capital to
advance for constant and variable capital; or when there is insufficient labour
power or means and objects of production from the technical or input-output
point of view; and/or when there is insufficient money in the form of revenues to
realize total values produced. In contrast, theories of economic crisis defined as
ruptures in the capital circuits which are intentionally or unintentionally produced
by direct working-class action exemplify social disintegration, which may or may
not result in system disintegration. These occur when the wage struggle interrupts
the money circuit of capital; or when sabatoge, slowdowns, or refusals to permit
technological change, interrupt the productive circuit; and/or when self-reduction
of prices, rents, mass theft, consumer boycotts, etc. interrupt the commodity
circuit. If we imagine crises travelling through the circuits of capital which in tlus
sense function as vehcles or avenues of class struggle, we would see a combination
of systemic and social disintegrative processes, which may or may not reinforce
one another. For example, worker struggles may be system-stabilizing or destabi-
lizing. Wage struggles may resolve systemic problems of value realization. Self-
reduction of prices may help resolve credit crises and inflation. Stoppages in pro-
duction which reduce the amount of capital which is needed to be advanced may
help resolve liquidity problems. And so on.
This kind of approach to crisis theory can delineate logical possibilities of
crisis but little else. Even if the model is enlarged to include not only shortages of
money capital, labour power, and effective demand but also fiscal resources,
political and administrative resources, motivations, etc. only logical possibilities
present themselves. For example, fiscal deficits may or may not activate motiva-
tion or legitimation deficits. Profits deficits may or may not activate fiscal short-
ages. Reduced capacities for administrative rationality or economic steering may
or may not reinforce fiscal and profits shortages. And so on. However, in the same
way that ruptures in the circuits of capital may be conceived as systemically pro-
duced or created by working-class intervention, administrative capacity and ration-
ality, political legitimacy, motivations, and so on may be conceived in terms of
capitalist logic or within the framework of emancipatory practice. Yet the differ-
ence between such practice within the circuits of capital on the one hand and
within the state and cultural processes generally on the other hand is very pro-
found. The wages, hours, working conditions, and price struggles occur within the
logic of capital valorization. By contrast, in the course of social and political
struggles substantive rationahty confronts capitalist technical rationality; legi-
timation within workingclass movements confronts state legitimation; social
motivations confront individual motivations.
These kinds of formulations of crisis theory, which a reading of Habermas
inspires under present crisis conditions, are a definite improvement over marxist
objectivism, but they lead to dead ends because they do not break sharply enough
with traditional marxism, which remains rooted in nineteenth-century conditions
of capitalist accumulation. In fact, the structural-functionalist presuppositions of
 James 0 %onnor 323

this approach unexpectedly reinforce orthodox marxism’s theory of ‘capital logic’.

Habermas, for example, believes that there are emancipatory possibilities within
crises only in spheres of life not yet totally penetrated by capital. (Bolaff, 1979,
171). ‘Symmetrical and more expressive forms of interaction’ are possible only
within newly proletarianized sectors, youth cultures, marginal workers, oppressed
minorities, and above all within the women’s movement. Habermas assumes that
the working-class classically defined is subsumed under capital not only within
the labour process but also culturally and politically. He therefore fails to grasp
capital and class struggle as a living contradiction, in other words that all activity
is both symmetrical and asymmetrical, expressive and nonexpressive. His formu-
lation loses sight of the crucial fact that real life communication exemplifies neither
the domination of capital over labour nor emancipation and freedom but rather
both simultaneously, i.e, that real communication and social interaction in class
society is characterized first and foremost by the ambiguity of language and action.
This is why social theoretical decoding methods should be central to crisis theory.
It is also why both marxist orthodoxy and Habermas’s neomarxism separate econo-
mic from social-political theory. In the Party, economic crisis theory remains in
the hands of specialized economists while political theory remains the monopoly
of the Central Committee. In Habermas’s world, subjectivity is reintroduced at the
level of analysis of the social relationships of production, but economic theory
remains separate and at the limit purged from the study of sociology or historical
materialism. At bottom, traditional marxism and the ‘Habermas school’ share the
view that crises occur because of systemic contradictions of capitalism which
subsequently become preconditions for either the restoration of capital’s domina-
tion of society or emancipatory social transformation. The possibility that crises
are socially constructed rather than systemically created underscores the limitations
of the medical model of crisis in which there is no room for the human subject to
create his or her own crisis (at least not in terms of the external germ model of
disease). It also underscores the limits of radical Durkheimianism which stresses
that crisis is a ‘process of destruction and construction, challenge and response, of
unsettling anomaly and nascent attempts to proliferate interpretive responses which
subvert the old normality’ (Keane, 1979, 184).34 As we have seen, the reason is
that this kind of thinking grasps opposing logical possibilities above, rather than
contradictory r e a l i t i e ~ .This
~ ~ is exemplified in Habermas’s definition of crisis in
terms of possibilities of new speech situations which can create normatively
grounded consensuses, which however are not shown as actually being accomplish-
ed in everyday life. Finally, this kind of crisis model is oriented more to thoughts
and feelings than to social p~actice.)~

As Keane says on the very next page, this can be applied to capital‘s strategists too.
’ ‘With reference to social processes, this means . . . that the disintegration of the natural
attitudes of those who have become objects of system paralysis promises a self-consciousness
of this objective paralysis and perhaps active attempts to overcome it’ (Keane, 1979).
3 6 ‘. . . Images of “crisis” are intermeshed inextricably with a daily life which tends to produce
apathy, fear, meaninglessness and hopes and desires for a better world’ (Keane, 1979).
324 m e meaning of crisis

VI Crisis as class struggle

The alternative view of crisis is that modern accumulation crisis tendencies are not
the result of ‘systemic contradictions’ of capitalism, but rather originate in the
emancipatory practices of human beings. In this model, ‘crisis’ defined in social-
scientific terms means that the formation of needs, modern forms of capitalist
competition, politics, state structures and policies, and working-class practice in
the broadest sense are in effect permanent barriers or limits to capitalist accumu-
lation. ‘Crisis’ defined ideologically is an element in capital’s counterattack on
the working-class offensive against the law of value. Alain Touraine, for example,
argues that the concept of ‘crisis’ is ideological when it is inappropriately substi-
tuted for the concept of transformation of the technical and administrative appara-
tus and political system by social movements seeking forms of ‘self-management’
(Touraine, 1977). In this event, ‘crisis’ is an element in ruling-class ideology because
it calls for the top down reorganization of society. The popular fusion of social-
scientific and ideological concepts of crisis means, first, that there develops a kind
of permanent crisis consciousness which exists independently of capitalist ‘laws of
motion’, and, second, that ‘crisis’ itself means class struggle.
The possibility that crisis means class struggle in the modern epoch has its roots
in Council Communism and other ‘workerist’ tendencies, including the Auronomiu
tendency in Italy, movements of oppressed minorities in the imperialist countries,
national liberation struggles, women’s struggles, and the ‘new left’.37 Manuel
Castells, for example, states that modern economic crisis is ‘caused by a general
process of social disruption in the most advanced capitalist societies’ (Castells,
1980, 5).)O Social disorganization has ‘called into question the structure of social
relationships underlying the pattern of capital accumulation. . .and triggered the
structural tendencies toward a falling rate of profit’. This line of attack on the
problem of crisis is a vast improvement over marxist orthodoxy because it links
social structure and social organization to economic crisis generally and the profit
rate in particular.
The problem with this approach is that it fails to develop the relation between
processes of ‘social disruption’ and dialectically related processes of ‘social re-
construction’. This means that social institutions do not simply ‘disintegrate’ but
instead are subverted or destroyed by new institutions, however informal or fleet-
ing. Society becomes not simply ‘disrupted’ or ‘anomic’ or ‘normless’ but rather is
torn by completing and contradictory norms. Social integration per se is not at
stake but rather what kind of social integration governed by what kind of norms,
goals, and practices. This concept of crisis restores the dialectical unity between
‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’ or between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’, hence it permits

’ A summary of the history of the idea that ‘capital’ means ‘class struggle’ can be found in
Cleaver (1979).
‘. . . we do not see the theory of class struggle and the theory of the falling rate of profit
as contradictory but as complementary. This is because the f i s t explains the effects of society
on capital and the second the effects of capital on society’ (Castells, 1980, 25).
 James O’Connor 325

us to grasp ‘crisis’ as the development of new social and political practices which
threaten existing social relationships, social structures, etc. Crisis defined as ‘turning
point’ exists when new power centres confront existing structures of domination;
when individual identity is split between contradictory premises; when it is gener-
ally unknown what can be taken for granted or expected from both existing and
emerging institutions, organizations, social practices, and roles. ‘Crisis’ defined in
this way has weak status in orthodox marxist thought and most varieties of neo-
marxism, and no status whatsoever in bourgeois thought because within its un-
dialectical problematic new social relationships are grasped as building on, gradually
replacing, or adapting to older relationships and practices. The usual claim is that
boundary lines between older and emergent social processes, values, norms, and so
on are blurred by processes of mutual adaptation or mystified by only apparent
resemblances between old and new.
A social-scientific view adequate to the task of comprehending the present
crisis is to interpret the roots of both decadent or blocked social processes and
emancipatory possibilities as lying in the same human critical practice. Crisis is
therefore not anomie or social disintegration but social struggle and social reinte-
gration. This crisis definition is faithful to historical fact because when crises
defined as threats to older social relationships ‘break out’, social classes and class
fractions which cling most tenaciously to old premises and material and ideolo-
gical resources fight back most violently, in this way creating conditions for histori-
cal ruptures. Struggles ensue in which old power centres try to reinforce and
defend structures of domination and control. The greater the threat from new
centres of power, ceteris panbus, the greater the resistance thrown up by the old
centres of domination. This is why the essence of crisis is not social disintegration
but social struggle. As Marx, Engels and Lenin’s political writings suggest, it is only
the resistance of the established social powers which test fully the strength of
emerging social powers. When new social forces strengthen themselves through
struggle to overcome the hardening resistance of old power centres, there develops
a conjuncture during which the old social relationships may be restructured. On
the other hand, old power centres may succeed in smashing or taming the standard
bearers of the new social practices, which may even be adapted to the needs of the
existing dominant social relationships. In either case, the struggles of old powers to
defend themselves by reinforcing their particular structures of domination are
themselves costly. Social struggles which constitute crisis moments in which ob-
jective and subjective processes apparently collapse into a single combat, but which
remain structurally distinct in the social and individual ‘unconscious’, invariably
raise the materials, ideological, and political ante. Gains and losses are combined
historical processes. Crisis resolution therefore expresses itself not only as the
abatement of struggle but also as the capitalization of gains, the rebuilding of
weakened structures of domination, the abandonment of previously strategic
defensive positions, and the adaptation of old ideologies. Failure of attempts by
the working class to restructure society driven originally by the law of value leads
back to obsessive compulsive accumulation with new layers of ideological legiti-
326 The meaning of crisis

mations. By contrast, successful struggle is based not only on the reconstruction

of social relationships but also on the self-destruction of capital suffered in the
course of its counterattack to prevent these new social relationships from des-
troying the old.
In this concept of crisis, legitimation crises, crises of authority and administra-
tive rationality, motivations and incentives crises, and so on mean that older norms
and social mechanisms can no longer be accepted in a matter-of-fact way. It cannot
be taken for granted that political consensus through established patterns of co-
alition-building is possible nor accepted matter-of-factly that the state can steer
the capitalist economy successfully. Men cannot take it for granted that women
will perform their traditional duties and so on. This concept of crisis also means
however that cynicism is merely one element is an ensemble of contradictory
attitudes. It means that while normal social and individual capacities are in part
or whole lost, human capacities are at the same time redefined. Political leaders
build new fighting coalitions. Communities reconstruct steering mechanisms or
invent new ones. Men develop their own emotional support networks. Workers
adopt new attitudes and practices about technology and its uses, the nature of the
labour process and the product of labour, and the nature of social reproduction as a
whole.
The significance of this whole line of analysis is not merely that human ideolo-
gical and technical interventions are needed to resolve crisis through social and
system reintegration but also (and most importantly) that crises in established
institutions and social and economic processes are produced through reconstituted
human interventions which the contradictions of capital and capitalist society in
general make possible. Contradictions within the productive circuit of capital;
problematic will formation, need determination, and personal motivation within
the sphere of consumption; irrationalities in the money and commodity circuits
of capital, within the sphere of capitalist competition, and in state administration;
questionable political participation and divided loyalties; etc., not only ‘result’
from crisis but also have powerful independent effects today on the profit rate,
and the rate and stability of capital accumulation.
In sum, traditional marxist and radical Durkheimian crisis theories which inter-
pret social movements as reactions to crisis symptoms are fatalistic. By contrast,
crisis theory which grasps the fact that social movements operate in fields within
and against the law of value are not fatalistic. It is true that under certain con-
ditions traditional marxism may be able to ‘predict the future’, but it can never
predict ‘what can be made to happen in the future’ precisely because it keeps its
distance from actual social practice. Traditional marxist theories are both volun-
taristic and deterministic by definition because they are based on positivistic
methodologies the premise of which is not to change the world but merely to
understand it. Social scientific crisis theory must be formulated in terms of what
has been made to happen in history and what can be made to happen in the
future, rather than in terms of what has happened and what will probably happen.
 James O’Connor 327

Crisis theory thus meaningfully explains social action when and only when it
has become a weapon in the hands of the working-class movement.

College 8, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

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Cet article constitue une critique de la t h h r i e marxiste traditionnelle ou ’scientifque’ de la

crise, fondhe sur la definition de la crise comme une interruption dans l’accumulation de
capital, ou ‘desintegration d’un systime’ et, dans un sens plus large, sur le concept de la logique
interne ou ‘lois objectives de la circulation’ de l’kconomie capitaliste. C‘est une critique de
l’interprktation traditionnelle de la thhrie marxiste dkclarant que la limite veritable de la
production capitaliste est le capital lui-mdme, en termes de l’accroissement du capital-valeur et
de la baisse du taux de profit. Cet article contient kgalement une brive explication critique
de la thhorie neomarxiste de la crise dkfiiie comme une interruption des structures d’actes
normatifs ou ‘desintegration sociale’. La conclusion consiste en une reconstruction du concept
de crise comme un ‘confit social’ ou une lutte de classes’ et une nouvelle intkgration sociale
pr6sentk comme une alternative marxiste au nhomarxisme Durkheimien radical.
 James 0%onnor 329

Dieser Artikel bietet eine kritische Besprechung der traditionellen oder ‘wissenschaftlichen’
marxistischen Krisentheorie, nach welcher die Krise als eine Unterbrechung in der Kapitalan-
sammlung oder ‘Auflosung des Systems’ definiert wird und welche allgemein gesehen auf dem
Konzept der inneren Logik oder der ‘objektiven Bewegungsgesetze’ des kapitalistischen
Wirtschaftssystems beruht. Der Artikel legt eine Kritik der traditionellen Ausdeutung der
These MarxS VOI, dal3 ‘die Grenze des Kapitals das Kapital selbst’ sei, im Sinne der Tendenz
fallender Ertrage und der Kapital-uberproduktion. Der Artikel enthalt ferner eine k u n e
kritische Betrachtung der zur Zeit vorherrschenden ‘neomarxistischen’ Krisentheorie, nach
welcher die Krise als eine Unterbrechung der normativen Handlungsstrukturen oder als ‘soziale
Auflosung’ definiert wird. AbschlieDend folgt eine Rekonstruktion des Konzeptes der Krise als
‘Sozialkonflikt’ oder ‘Klassenkampf und ‘soziale Wiederherstellung’, welches als marxistische
Alternative zum radikalen Durkheimianismus des ‘Neomarxismus’ dargestellt wird.

Este artfculo es una resefia critica de la teorla rnarxista tradicional o ‘cientifca’ de la crisis
basada en la definicidn de crisis como una interrupcidn en la acumulacidn de capital, o‘desin-
tegracidn del sistema’, y, mds ampliamente, en el concepto de la ldgica interna o ‘leyes ob-
jetivas de mocidn’ de la economfa capitalista. Avanza una crltica de la interpretacidn tradi-
cional de la tdsis de Marx que ‘el llmite del capital es el mismo capital‘, en terminos dc la
tendencia de la tasa decreciente de beneficios y superproduccidn de capital. Este artiCd0
tambien conticne una breve relatidn crftica de la teorfa ‘neomarxista’ dominante de la crisis
basada en la definicidn de crisis como una interrupcidn de las estructuras normativas de accidn
o ‘desintegracidn social’. Concluye con una reconstruccidn del concepto de crisis como un
‘conflicto social’ o ‘lucha de las clases‘ y ‘desintegracibn social’ que se presenta como una
alternativa marxista al Durkheimianismo radical de ‘neomarxismo’.