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.
Section 7: Breakdown Theories
In the preface to his “Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy,” the only major economic work of his mature period other than Volume I of “Capital” that Marx published during his lifetime, Marx explained that the underlying cause of the replacement of one mode of production by another is to be found in the changes in the forces of production.
Marx wrote:
“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
“In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”
The ‘breakdown’ controversy
If capitalism can continue to develop the forces of production without limit, then by Marx’s criteria, it should last indefinitely. Didn’t Marx explain that “[no] social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed”? In direct contradiction to Marx, many socialists have argued over the decades that capitalism will be replaced by socialism because socialism is a better or more moral system, not because it is an economic necessity.
If Marx was right, socialism, if it is to come, will arrive not simply because a “better world is possible,” but because a better world is necessary. But what are the limits beyond which capitalism cannot develop the productive forces? The study of the historical limits of capitalist production is sometimes called “breakdown theory.” Various breakdown theories have been proposed. Let’s examine the history of this discussion and some popular breakdown theories.
A Critique of Crisis Theory 