A Marxist Guide to Capitalist Crises
“A Marxist Guide to Capitalist Crises,” an eBook created from the key posts on the Critique of Crisis Theory blog, is currently in production. We’ll be sharing the completed chapters between our regular postings.
Chapter 1
Modern Underconsumption Theories
The first underconsumptionist theories were put forward by pre-Marxist bourgeois economists such as Sismondi and Malthus. As trade unions developed, these theories gained considerable support among their members and supporters.
By their very nature, labor unions correctly rejected Malthus and Ricardo’s view that wages could never rise above bare subsistence. If we drop the assumption that workers’ wages will always be barely enough to keep body and soul together and no more, can’t we increase the demand for commodities by raising wages?
Pro-trade union underconsumptionists argue: Since the vast majority of the population in highly developed capitalism are wage and salary earners, won’t increasing their incomes increase the effective demand for commodities? How can the capitalists be expected to consume the huge profits they make when wages are low? Even the wealthy have limits on how many fine wines they can drink, mansions they can live in, or Gulfstream private jets they can fly around.
The crude underconsumption argument goes like this: Wage workers can buy back only a portion of what they produce. This is true. If it weren’t, no surplus value would be produced; there would be no profit and, therefore, no capitalism.
Didn’t Marx himself say that the restricted consumption of the masses was the cause of all real crises? Now, it is true that if the production were carried out for the needs of the actual producers — workers —there would yet be a crisis of overproduction. If indeed production were carried out for the needs of the workers, we would have neither commodity production nor capitalism. And without commodity production, there would be no generalized overproduction of commodities. However, this does not mean that underconsumptionism provides an adequate crisis theory.
In its crudest forms, underconsumption assumes that capitalists live on air! For underconsumptionism to provide us with an adequate theory of crisis, it is necessary to demonstrate that capitalists and their hangers-on can neither physically consume the entire surplus product produced through their personal or their productive consumption. However, we find that even in the more sophisticated underconsumptionist theories, the inability of the capitalists and their hangers-on to physically consume the surplus product is always assumed, not proven.
Labor unionists holding this view assert that raising wages or raising the living standards of the great mass of people leads to a “virtuous cycle” of rising demand and higher profits for the capitalists because their increased labor costs will be more than compensated for by the increase in the demand for their products.
The higher profits made possible by expanding markets, they reason, lead to an increased number of jobs. Recessions — the generalized commodity gluts identified by Sismondi and Malthus — will be avoided or at least minimized if wages are high. When the bosses resist demands by the trade unions for higher wages and shorter hours, the underconsumpionists contend that the capitalists are acting against their own self-interest.
A ‘Fordist’ model of high-wage capitalism
Well-meaning European writers influenced by underconsumptionist theories often refer to the “Fordist” model of “high-wage” capitalism. Fordism refers to the U.S. industrial capitalist Henry Ford (1863-1947). This famous automobile manufacturer paid relatively high wages to his workers in the 1920s, so it is said they could afford to buy the Model T autos they were producing for Ford. By allowing his workers to buy back the automobiles, the underconsumptionists hold, Ford created a market for them.
They reason that Henry Ford’s enlightened high-wage policies provided the model for the great prosperity of 1948-1973. Following Ford’s example, capitalists in the United States, Western Europe, and later Japan finally began to pay their workers wages high enough so they could enjoy a “decent” middle-class lifestyle. Underconsumptionists assert that for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, workers could afford to purchase the ever-increasing mass of commodities they produced for the capitalists. This new “high wage,” or “Fordist,” capitalism, it was claimed, could now avoid the series of severe and worsening recessions that had climaxed with the economic collapse of 1929 and the Great Depression.
The retreat from ‘Fordist’ high-wage capitalism and the return of severe recessions
However, underconsumptionists complain that since 1973, the capitalists have been increasingly turning their back on “Fordism,” which had been working so well for both workers and capitalists. Instead, they have returned to the old failed policies of holding down wages in a short-sighted bid to increase their profits by cutting “labor costs.” The pro-labor underconsumptionists claim this has led to the return of deep recessions.
Severe global recessions occurred in 1974-1975, 1979-1982, and, worst of all — as of the time of this writing — 2007-2009. Underconsumptionists warn that abandoning “Fordist” policies that prevailed between 1948 and 1973 could end in another 1930s-style economic collapse or “Great Depression.”
During the 2007-09 crisis and the election of Barack Obama in 2008, at the very height of the crisis, there were hopes that the capitalists had learned the lesson underconsumptionists were trying to teach them. They hoped for a return to the “Fordist” high-wage policies that reconciled the interests of “capital and labor.” The capitalists, however, failed to learn the lesson. Instead, they used the mass unemployment produced by the 2007-2009 crisis to drive wages even lower and launch a new series of “austerity plans.”
‘Fordism,’ myth and reality
However, the term “Fordism” is never used in the above sense in Ford’s own country, the United States of America, for a good reason. The “enlightened industrial capitalist” Henry Ford had a certain German friend and admirer. His name was Adolf Hitler, and the admiration was mutual.
Ford and Hitler saw eye to eye on the “Jewish Question.” Ford, like Hitler, was an extreme anti-Semite who published tracts on the Jewish question that won Hitler’s praise. Less well known today is the fact that Ford agreed with his German friend on the trade union question as well. Once he came to power in Germany in 1933, Hitler wasted little time suppressing all genuine labor unions.
Ford brutally resisted the unionization of his factories. While General Motors and the other automobile bosses agreed to recognize the United Auto Workers after the mass sit-down strikes of the mid-1930s, the pro-Hitler Ford refused. Instead, he used his brutal Ford Service System, a Gestapo-like private police force, to spy on, fire, and beat up anybody who was seeking to organize a union in Ford’s plants.
The UAW and other U.S. labor militants used the word “Fordism” to describe Ford’s stubborn refusal to recognize the right of his workers to organize an independent union to represent their interests and bargain collectively. This indeed is the real “Fordist” model. Ford only recognized the UAW in 1941 when the U.S. government pressured the old industrial tyrant to do so in the interests of wartime “national unity.”
Did Ford earn profits by paying his workers relatively high wages?
In reality, Henry Ford never realized a penny in profit by selling his cars to his workers, nor did any other industrial capitalist. At most, Ford merely recouped part of the money he advanced in wages when he sold his cars to his own workers.
Suppose Ford sold all his cars to his workers, which is far from true. The money he spent on wages would have flowed back to him in the form of sales — no losses here but also no profits. In Marxist terms, this would have enabled him to realize only his variable capital or the labor power he purchased from his workers to produce his autos. No matter what this amount of money was, it would have earned back only a portion of his cost price — the portion of the cost price represented by his “labor costs.”
However, the “price of labor” only covered a portion of the costs that Ford incurred when he produced a Model T. In addition, there were his other “prime costs” such as raw and auxiliary materials—for example, the electricity to power his huge plants. He also had depreciation costs on his gigantic factories, such as the River Rouge plant, his machines on his assembly lines, and the lathes, mills, and presses in his machine shops.
If he had only realized his “variable capital” and nothing else — the case if he had sold all his cars to his workers — he would not only have failed to realize a penny of profit, he would have incurred a total loss on the capital he had to consume other than labor power. In this case, Ford would have incurred massive overall losses and would have soon gone out of business. It is sheer nonsense to say that Henry Ford made profits by paying his workers “decent wages” so that they could buy the Model T cars they were producing. To grasp this, we don’t need Ricardo or Marx; we simply need elementary bookkeeping.
Whatever Ford or his hired propagandists might have claimed, Ford realized this too, as does every real-world businessperson. That is why Ford was so opposed to unionizing his plants and thought the costs of his private Gestapo were well worth it as long as it succeeded in keeping the union out.
Then why did Ford pay relatively high wages?
Ford was forced to pay relatively high wages because he would have been unable to find many workers willing to work for him if he had paid the usual low wages of his day. Keeping up with the Ford assembly line was — and is — exhausting compared to many other jobs where the pace of work is far slower. Because of the greater intensity of work, Ford was forced to pay relatively high wages if his plants were not to stand idle because of a sheer lack of workers.
Marx’s theory of surplus value
To dig deeper into this subject, we must fully grasp Marx’s theory of surplus value, his single most important contribution to economics.
The classical law of value held that commodities that take on average the same quantity of labor to produce exchange for other commodities that require, on average, an identical quantity of labor to produce. Or, in short, equal quantities of labor embodied in commodities exchange for equal quantities of labor. But how does this apply to the selling of workers’ labor?
A big contradiction in Ricardian value theory
If workers sell their labor at its value, where does the profit come from? On average, after all, industrial capitalists are forced to buy all other commodities at their values. And if they also have to pay the full value for the labor they purchase — according to the Ricardian theory of value, labor, like any other commodity, should on average sell at its value — how can they sell their commodities at their values, and still make a profit?
Suppose, to produce a certain amount of linen, an industrial capitalist purchases 12 hours worth of labor from a worker per day. According to Ricardo, a capitalist would have to pay the worker a sum representing 12 hours of labor. In addition, the capitalist would have to purchase other commodities, such as raw and auxiliary materials — coal to run his steam engines, for example — as well as incur depreciation costs on his fixed capital.
But how, then, was the capitalist supposed to make a profit? Malthus claimed that the capitalist would just add a profit to his costs, but the logical Ricardo would have none of that. If every capitalist raised the prices of their commodities above their values, these price increases would simply cancel out, and there still would be no profit. Neither Ricardo nor his pro-capitalist supporters, nor indeed the Ricardo-inspired socialist critics who followed, were able to answer this paradox. Marx — not the right way either — hit upon the answer around 1857.
Marx, after years of wrestling with bourgeois political economy, finally realized that workers do not sell their “labor” to the capitalists but rather their ability to work, their labor power. In exchange for a sum of money — a wage — workers put their ability to work at the disposal of the capitalists for a certain period, such as a day or week.
Workers use the money they earn by selling their ability to work, or labor power, to purchase the commodities that reproduce their own labor power — both personal labor power and raising their children, who represent the next generation of workers. Why is it so important to distinguish between labor and labor power? Aren’t we simply splitting hairs here? Not at all.
Like every other commodity, workers’ labor power embodies a certain quantity of human labor — the labor that, given the current conditions of production, is on average necessary to produce the commodities the workers must consume to reproduce their labor power. We should also note that labor power is not a capitalist-produced commodity. The quantity of labor embodied in their labor power sold to the capitalists for a given period is quite different than the amount of labor the workers must perform for the capitalists in the same period.
The confusion arises because the use value of the labor power the capitalists purchase and productively consume by putting the workers to work, on one hand, and the labor the workers perform, on the other, are measured by the same unit — time.
For example, in a 40-hour week, the capitalists purchase and consume 40 hours of the worker’s labor power, and the workers perform 40 hours of labor. However, we are dealing with two different things here. First, we measure a certain quantity of the use value — not the value — of the commodity labor power.
If wages rose so high that the workers were paid for the entire value that they produced, their labor power would have no use value for the capitalist because it would produce no surplus value. This puts an outermost limit to how high wages can rise under given conditions of production.
Second, we are measuring the amount of labor that workers must perform after they have sold their labor power.
The amount of labor that the workers perform is also measured in terms of time; in our example, 40 hours of labor.
The workers sell 40 hours of labor power as a use value and then perform 40 hours of labor. As the 40 hours of labor becomes embodied in the commodities the worker is producing, it adds 40 hours of value to the commodities.
Suppose it takes only 20 hours on average — which represents the value — to produce 40 hours of labor power as a use value. In this case, the labor power that has a value of 20 hours produces 40 hours of labor.
In this case, the ratio of unpaid labor — 20 hours — to paid labor — also 20 hours — is 1 or 100%. The rate of surplus value or the rate of exploitation will be 100%. The worker will then spend half of their working day working for themselves and half of the working day working for the industrial capitalists and the other non-worker consumers of surplus value. This rate of surplus value must not be confused with the rate of profit because in calculating the rate of surplus value, we divide the surplus value only by the variable capital, but when we calculate the rate of profit by dividing the surplus value by the total advanced capital and not just the variable capital.
The difference in the amount of labor that the workers perform and the actual value of their labor power, also measured in hours of labor, represents what Marx called surplus value. The surplus value becomes profit when the capitalists realize it in money form by selling their commodities.
Therefore, the capitalists pay only for the first 20 hours of labor. The workers perform the rest of the 20 hours of labor without pay for the capitalists.
Indeed, the use value of the commodity labor power for its capitalist purchaser is that it produces a surplus value above and beyond its own value. If labor power does not produce surplus value, it has no use value for the capitalist.
The rate of surplus value
In our case, Marx would say the rate of surplus value is 100 percent. The portion of the labor performed free of charge by the workers for the capitalists — 20 hours, according to our example — is divided by the portion of labor that the capitalists actually pay for. The rate of surplus value could be higher or it could be lower than 100 percent. But if the rate of surplus value were to fall to zero, labor power would lose all use value to the capitalists. The capitalists would refuse to buy it. It is from the surplus value that profit and ground rent — and all the incomes that derive from these two primary incomes — arise.
Three parts of a commodity’s value
As we saw in the case of Henry Ford’s Model T cars, the value of a commodity can be divided into three parts. The first part is the value that is passed to the commodity during its production from the used-up constant capital — fixed capital, raw materials, and auxiliary materials, for example, the electrical power to light the factory.
The second is the value that replaces the value of the labor power that is consumed by the industrial capitalist in the commodity’s production. This is the necessary labor — the paid labor — that makes it possible for the worker to live.
Third and not least is the part of the value of the commodity that constitutes surplus value. It is this portion of the commodity’s value that provides the actual motive for the industrial capitalist to carry out production.
Notice here, when we make this division, we are talking in terms of value — hours of abstract human labor embodied in the given commodity — and saying nothing at all about the use value of the commodity in question.
A particular commodity as a use value is destined to perform one of the following five functions.
- As a use value it can function as an item of personal consumption for a productive (of surplus value) worker. While for the worker, it is an item of personal consumption, it plays a much larger role for capitalist production as a whole. First, when the workers consume it, it allows them to both reproduce their personal labor power as well as help raise the next generation of workers. In terms of the value of the commodity, when the workers consume it, it transfers its value both to the workers’ labor power and to the developing labor powers of their children.
- A use value might function as an item of personal consumption for newly hired productive (of surplus value) workers. Alternatively, it might function as an item of personal consumption for already employed productive (of surplus value) workers whose hours of labor have been extended. In both cases, the commodity will represent surplus value that has been transformed into additional variable capital.
- A use value can replace used-up raw or auxiliary material or a machine that has been fully consumed in the process of production and, therefore, has reached the end of its life as a means of production. Its role is to replace the elements of the existing constant capital that have been used up. In this case, our commodity represents a part of the capitalist’s constant capital.
- The commodity may be destined to function in production as an item of fixed capital or raw or auxiliary material to be used to expand the existing scale of production. In this case, the commodity will represent the surplus value converted into new constant capital.
- Some of the commodities produced will function as items of personal consumption for the capitalists and other consumers of surplus value, such as landowners and clergy — Malthus’s third consumers — that enable these persons to live without working. The use values of these commodities might represent necessaries like food that all people need to live, or they might represent luxury items like “fine carriages” in Ricardo’s time or Gulfstream jets today. When these use values are consumed, their values disappear without a trace. Unlike the values of the commodities consumed by the productive workers, the values of these commodities can only be replaced by a portion of the surplus value produced by the productive workers. As material use values, these commodities represent the social surplus product that does not function as new means of production but instead functions as personal means of consumption of the capitalists and their hangers-on, either as necessities or luxury goods.
Commodity capital
The inventories of newly produced commodities of an industrial capitalist that have yet to be sold represent what Marx called commodity capital. When Sismondi and Malthus talked about the danger of a general glut of commodities, they had in mind the overproduction of commodity capital.
The industrial capitalists who produce commodity capital are indifferent to the use values of the commodities that make up the commodity capital. They see them simply as values — not use values — that are greater than the values of the commodities that made up the capital they began with.
Through the process of commodity exchange, each individual commodity will end up in the hands of its ultimate consumer. Whether the ultimate consumers are productive workers or industrial capitalists or unproductive consumers of surplus value, such as landowners, they are very much concerned with the use value of the commodity they purchase. A lathe, for example, cannot function as a means of personal consumption for a worker, nor could Henry Ford use a loaf of bread to cut metal in one of his machine shops.
Therefore if the capitalists are to avoid either the underproduction or overproduction of particular commodities, every commodity must be produced in the right proportion in terms of both use values and values. Only if they are will the capitalist economy be able to function optimally.
In the real world, commodities are produced in only approximately correct proportions. Even during periods of general prosperity, commodities are either being over- or under-produced at any given time, which degrades the process of (re)production to a certain extent but not enough to cause it to dissolve into general chaos. If commodities were to be produced in radically wrong proportions in either value or use value, the capitalist economy would indeed collapse into chaos.
Does a fall in the rate of surplus value lead to an expansion of the market?
Let’s examine an individual industrial capitalist who produces work clothes destined to be consumed only by members of the working class. To our industrial capitalist, the work clothes that he produces will represent his commodity capital. Like all other industrial capitalists, he is completely indifferent to their use value. But to the buyers of work clothes — productive workers — the use value of the clothes is the whole point of buying them as opposed to another commodity with a different use value.
Where do our productive workers get the money to buy the work clothes? By selling their labor power. When our work-clothes capitalist sells his commodity, he exchanges it for a sum of money that in the hands of the workers, represents wages income. This money realizes all three parts of the value of our work-clothes capitalist’s commodity capital, including the part that represents the surplus value. It is here that our naive if well-meaning underconsumptionists begin their analysis.
According to them, our capitalist can only sell his commodity work clothes at their full value and realize a profit because the workers are receiving incomes in the form of wages. If wages rise—or the rate of surplus value falls— our work clothes capitalist will indeed incur rising labor costs. However, the rise in wages will enable workers to buy more work clothes. Therefore, the rise in wages will be not only in the interest of the workers but also of the capitalist.
What the underconsumptionists forget is that not all commodities are produced for the consumption of the working class. Of the five possible uses of a commodity that we examined above, it turns out that only the first — supporting already employed workers — and the second — supporting newly hired workers or workers whose hours of labor have been extended — are actually consumed by the workers. The other three categories are either productively or unproductively destined for the consumption of the capitalists or other consumers of surplus value.
For example, take the example of a capitalist who produces Gulfstream luxury jets that can only be purchased by capitalists — not every capitalist but only the richest capitalists. This fellow realizes all three portions of his commodity’s value — constant capital, variable capital and surplus value — by exchanging his commodity against money that represents only surplus value realized in money form—profit.
To such a capitalist, the higher the rate of surplus value — or the lower wages are — the greater will be the expansion of his market since the higher the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit, the more capitalists will be able to afford his expensive Gulfstream jets. Even our naive if well-meaning underconsumptionists will have to concede that the Gulfstream capitalist is not going to be any ally of the working class.
And then there are the capitalists who produce commodities that function as means of producing other commodities — raw materials, auxiliary materials such as electricity, builders of factory buildings, and machine producers. These capitalists produce commodities that are purchased only by other capitalists. Some of the market for these capitalists is provided by replacing existing machines. But another part of the market is provided by adding to the existing means of production.
Just as is the case with our Gulfstream capitalist, the market for these fellows will expand fastest when the rate of profit is highest, or what comes to the same thing, when the workers are most exploited. For them, the more the workers are exploited and the higher the rate of profit the higher their profits should be. More bad capitalists!
Now, let’s return to our work clothes-producing capitalist — the “good” capitalist. Is he really an ally of the working class? First, he doesn’t want to pay higher wages to his own workers if he can avoid it.
Also, is it true that a rise in wages will necessarily expand his market, as our underconsumptionists assume? Suppose wages fall, causing the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit to rise. If this happens, our capitalist will have more surplus value to transform into additional capital, including variable capital. If each worker is paid less, each worker will indeed have lower wages and be able to purchase fewer work clothes.
But if more workers are hired, won’t our work clothes capitalist be able to compensate for the fewer clothes he sells to each individual worker by having more workers to sell clothes to? If the factories are expanding and hiring more workers, the market for work clothes will tend to expand for that very reason. In addition, there might be more overtime, so even some of our workers, though they will be earning less per hour, will be able to buy the same amount of work clothes or even a greater amount of work clothes because they will be working longer hours.
So it is far from certain that a rise in the rate of surplus value or fall in the wages of workers will necessarily contract the market for our work clothes capitalist. Lower wages for the workers — a rise in the rate of surplus value — could just as well expand his market, though if it does, it will expand his market less than it will expand the market that produces commodities for his fellow capitalists, such as our Gulfstream capitalist does. And there is always the competitive advantage that our work clothes capitalist will gain through lowering his own “labor costs.”
Equalization of the rate of profit
As virtually all schools of economic theory recognize, the rate of profit tends to equalize between different industries. If the rate of profit falls below the average in a certain sector of production, capital will flow out of that sector into other sectors where the rate of profit is higher. It might be true that in certain situations, a rise in wages by expanding the market for certain capitalists who sell their commodities to workers would more than compensate for the increased “labor costs.” In this case, while the average rate of profit would fall due to higher wages, the rate of profits of those capitalists that sell to the workers might rise despite their own higher labor costs.
But in such a situation, the higher rate of profit earned by the capitalists that sell directly to workers will be only temporary. Capital in such a situation will flow out of industries that produce commodities for capitalists and into industries that produce commodities only for workers. This is highly desirable from the viewpoint of workers, and it is what the trade unions quite rightly fight for. But it won’t be so good for the work clothes capitalist. Our fellow will likely find a competitor or two setting up a business to challenge him. He will be forced to lower his prices, and his profit will, at the end of the day, fall to the new lower average rate of profit. A good outcome for the workers but a bad outcome for him!
So it begins to look as if even our “good” work clothes capitalist will not be much of an ally after all.
Who buys the growing mass of commodities produced by capitalist industry?
As we have seen, a huge and growing portion of the total commodity product is purchased by the capitalists themselves, a point overlooked by underconsumptionists who wonder who buys the commodities when the consumption of workers is so constricted by capitalist exploitation.
As Marx pointed out, workers are always overproducers from their viewpoint. They can never buy back more than a fraction of the total quantity of commodities they produce. However, this does not mean that the capitalists can never find markets for the growing mass of commodities they produce. If the capitalist could not find such markets, capitalism would not only not experience periodic crises of generalized overproduction; it would not exist at all.
Capitalist consumption breaks down into two parts: commodities designed for personal consumption and commodities that replace and increase the existing means of production. The portion of the surplus value that is destined to be consumed productively breaks down into two parts. One part of this surplus value will be transformed into new constant capital — raw materials, auxiliary materials, and fixed capital — while another portion will be transformed into additional variable capital to be used to hire additional workers as well as expanding the number of hours of work available to the already employed workers.
Even the part of the surplus value that is converted into new variable capital — labor power — will be consumed only by the industrial capitalists. However, when the capitalists purchase the labor power of workers with a sum of money, this enables the workers to live and, as Ricardo put it, “reproduce their race [class].” The capitalists are forced to allow the workers to live because without the class of workers, there would be no surplus value.
The defenders of capitalism argue that the higher the rate of surplus value — they, of course, do not use this terminology — and consequently the rate of profit, the more jobs will be created. When capitalist politicians talk about “jobs, jobs, jobs,” they really mean profits, profits, profits! We must always remember that only part of the surplus value that is converted into new capital is variable capital. In fact, an increasing portion of the surplus value that is converted into new capital takes the form of constant capital, which does not create jobs. So “jobs, jobs, jobs” not only means “profits, profits, profits,” it means not so many new jobs and more accumulation of constant capital. So a more accurate capitalist slogan would be “profits, profits, accumulate, accumulate!”
So it seems that the capitalists can find markets after all for the ever-growing mass of commodities they produce. While the ability of capitalists and their co-consumers of surplus value to consume unproductively may be limited to a certain extent — though we should never underestimate the ability of the rich and super-rich to engage in purely personal or unproductive consumption — their ability to consume productively appears to be unlimited. Attempting to explain crises by appealing to the physically limited capacity of the capitalist class to consume won’t do.
Sismondi’s argument that the contradiction between capitalism’s drive to increase production is limited only by the availability of exploitable resources (labor power on one hand and raw material on the other) and, therefore inevitably leads to periodic general gluts of commodities appears to be intuitively correct. The real-world history of capitalism since Sismondi’s day demonstrates that it experiences a more or less severe crisis of generalized overproduction at quasi-regular intervals of about seven to 11 years.
The business cycle, as our modern bourgeois economists call it, or trade cycle, has resisted all attempts by governments to stamp it out. Governments and economists have periodically announced that the business cycle has finally been abolished or at least rendered harmless. It can be said with little exaggeration that such an announcement is one of the best indicators that a major new crisis of the generalized overproduction of commodities is not far off.
However, when we examine the arguments of the underconsumptionists closely as to why these periodic “general gluts” occur, their case seems to melt away. Clearly, something is missing in their arguments, but what is it?
A Critique of Crisis Theory 