Skip to content

The Structural Crisis of Capital

Metadata

Highlights

the financial sphere feeds on the wealth generated by investment and the exploitation of a trained workforce worldwide. And it is a part of that wealth, channeled toward the financial sphere, that inflates flaccid, fictitious capital. — location: 166 ^ref-22389

having no limits to its expansion, the system of capital ends up as a destructive and deeply uncontrollable process. — location: 189 ^ref-20065

Superfluous production and consumerism corrode labor, with the correlation of more precarious employment and structural unemployment, as well as a level of destruction of nature never before seen on such a global scale. — location: 192 ^ref-26787

after a long period of cycles, the crisis, still according to Mészáros, has taken the shape of an endemic, cumulative, chronic, permanent crisis, which confronts us again as a vital imperative of our time, given the specter of global destruction, the task of creating a social alternative for building a new mode of production and a new way of life, one firmly and openly opposed to the destructive logic of the capitalist system dominant today. — location: 195 ^ref-65532

unlike the cycles of expansion that have shaped capitalism throughout its history, alternating periods of expansion and crisis, since the 1960s and 1970s, we find ourselves immersed in what Mészáros has called a depressed continuum showing the characteristics of a structural crisis. — location: 199 ^ref-54755

once the radical gulf between production for social needs and self-reproduction of capital changed the character of modern capitalism, with devastating consequences for mankind. — location: 202 ^ref-24449

a new period characterized not by cyclical interval of expansion and recession, but rather more frequent and longer lasting precipitations. — location: 204 ^ref-24186

the system of capital can no longer develop without using the decreasing rate of utilization of use-value of commodities as an intrinsic mechanism. — location: 206 ^ref-38425

that diminishing trend becomes one of the main mechanisms through which capital can accomplish its accumulation, by destroying the useful life of commodities and the subordination of use-value to the imperatives of exchange-value. — location: 212 ^ref-43338

The widening gulf between production truly dedicated to meeting human needs and production dedicated to the self-reproduction of capital intensifies the destructive side effects, of which the two mentioned above put the present and future of our species at risk: the structural pre-cariousness of labor and the destruction of nature. — location: 214 ^ref-23797

If, on the other hand, the world resumes its former rate of growth again, increasing production and the way of life founded on superfluity and waste, we shall see an even higher rate of nature’s destruction, intensifying the destructive logic now dominant. — location: 224 ^ref-41018

crunch,” for Mészáros, “the enormous speculative expansion of financial adventurism—particularly in the last three or four decades—is by its nature inseparable from a deepening of the crisis in the productive branches of industry as well as from the ensuing troubles arising from the utterly sluggish capital accumulation (and indeed failed accumulation) in the productive field of the economy. — location: 248 ^ref-52859

the necessary consequence of the ever deepening crisis in the productive branches of the ‘real economy’ … is the growth of unemployment everywhere on a frightening scale, and of the human misery associated with it. — location: 252 ^ref-42620

in April 1983. The article is reprinted in full in Part IV of his Beyond Capital. In it, he already made the distinction between structural and systemic crises and the cyclic or conjunctural crises of the past, — location: 263 ^ref-11279

“radical politics can only accelerate its own demise … if it consents to define its own scope in terms of limited economic targets which are in fact necessarily dictated by the established socioeconomic structure in crisis.” — location: 272 ^ref-1900

the pressure emanating from the given social base inevitably tends to define the task at hand in terms of finding urgent economic answers at the level of the crisis-manifestations themselves, while leaving their social causes intact. — location: 277 ^ref-12549

‘belt tightening’ and ‘accepting sacrifices needed’ to ‘creating real jobs,’ ‘injecting new investment funds’, ‘increasing productivity and competitiveness,’ etc.—imposes the social premises of the established order (in the name of purely economic imperatives) over the socialist political initiative — location: 280 ^ref-25598

Contrary to production based on surplus time in the service of exchange value for reproducing capital, it becomes vital to engage in activities based on disposable time dedicated to the production of socially useful goods corresponding to real needs. — location: 290 ^ref-58269

the use-value of socially needed goods became subordinated to their exchange-value, which dominated the logic of the system of production. — location: 292 ^ref-32598

in 1974 we had a three-day working week in Britain [introduced by the Conservative government to save energy during the miners’ strikes], and now we do not have it. And who could argue with that irrefutable fact? — location: 333 ^ref-43928

Marx used to say that on the pages of The Economist the ruling class is “talking to itself.” — location: 348 ^ref-41702

At the height of its productive power, this system is producing a global food crisis and the suffering of countless millions all over the world. That is the nature of the system that is expected to be saved now at all costs. — location: 388 ^ref-38692

the size of the global “real economy,” in which goods and services are produced and traded, is estimated at $48.1 trillion…. On the other hand, the size of the global “financial economy,” the total amount of stocks, securities, and deposits, adds up to $151.8 trillion. — location: 396 ^ref-62571

the contradictions must be fought out at the place where they are actually generated. — location: 1372 ^ref-46269

namely, the irreconcilable antagonism between total social capital and the totality of labor. — location: 1387 ^ref-1772

All the same, the reality of the different rates of exploitation and profit does not alter in the least the fundamental law itself: i.e., the growing equalization of the differential rates of exploitation as the global trend of development of world capital. — location: 1394 ^ref-62380

the crucial criterion for the assessment of partial measures is whether or not they are capable of functioning as Archimedean points: i.e., as strategic levers for a radical restructuring of the global system of social control. — location: 1467 ^ref-24885

Such a mysterious supra-individual entity, irrespective of its name, was supposed to achieve what in a non-antagonistically structured human society should be accomplished by freely determined comprehensive planning. And the projected supra-individual agency was supposed to fulfill the task of overall coordination and direction incomparably better, by definition, than particular individuals could even dream about. — location: 2413 ^ref-35796

the second condition that had to be satisfied was the production of overall societal cohesion. — location: 2422 ^ref-53026

transubstantiating the negative interchange of particularistic self-seeking competition as such into the positive benefits that were supposed to arise from the conflicts themselves for the whole. — location: 2424 ^ref-9885

Only a mysterious supra-individual agency—be that Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand,” Kant’s “Commercial Spirit,” or Hegel’s “Cunning of Reason”—could accomplish such ideal reconciliation of the irreconcilable. Thus, the projection of the supra-individual agency—in place of the required social organ of comprehensive planning, instituted by freely associated social (and not isolated self-seeking) individuals—could create from the standpoint of political economy the appearance of solving the real problem. — location: 2430 ^ref-11563

the class determined and structurally enforced hierarchical division of labor—which constitutes the real ground of the capital system’s irreconcilable and ultimately explosive fundamental antagonism— — location: 2439 ^ref-674

from capital’s vantage point, it was necessary to misrepresent the real nature of insuperable class antagonism—deeply inherent in, and thus for its solution requiring the radical change of, the historically given structural framework of society—as purely individual conflicts in civil society, whose reconciliation would not call for any structural change in the really existing society. — location: 2442 ^ref-63329

it was also necessary to tendentiously depict the real object of conflict—the historical confrontation over two, incompatible, hegemonic alternative modes of production, as a straightforward matter of individual consumption, whose magnitude could be enlarged through the readily quantifiable exchange-value of capital’s self-expansionary production process. — location: 2445 ^ref-37706

confinement of all feasible remedial adjustments to the sphere of individual consumption. — location: 2450 ^ref-56555

genuine socialist planning process is unthinkable without overcoming the fetishism of the commodity, with its perverse quantification of all human relations and activities. — location: 2472 ^ref-18900

there is a much more fundamental type of crisis, combined with cyclic crises under capitalism, affecting all conceivable forms of the capital system as such, not only capitalism. — location: 2826 ^ref-51673

Structural crisis asserts itself in the form of activating the absolute limits of capital as a mode of social metabolic reproduction. — location: 2828 ^ref-49145

it operated on the basis of the overwhelmingly political extraction of surplus-labor—had to implode under the globally intensifying contradictions of development. — location: 2830 ^ref-38314

The gravely unfolding crisis of our historical epoch is structural, precisely in the sense that it cannot be swept out of the way even by the many trillions of dollars spent in state capitalist rescue operations. — location: 2850 ^ref-22344

they can openly say because they have nationalized capitalist bankruptcy before (immediately after the Second World War in Britain on a major scale) and re-privatized all of the principal units of postwar nationalization after properly fattening them up from the generous resources of the public purse. — location: 2868 ^ref-63812

it depends primarily on the organizations of the working class whether or not this kind of approach can in the end prevail. — location: 2872 ^ref-49797

fundamental structural crisis, which may open up a sizeable breach in the established order because that order is no longer capable of delivering the goods that served as its—unquestioned—justification — location: 2876 ^ref-39716

the issue is the radical transformation of the incorrigible systemic determinations of capital as a mode of ultimately self-destructive societal control. — location: 2912 ^ref-25894

we are gravely burdened with some fundamental systemic problems, which cannot be solved within the confines of the capital system. — location: 2934 ^ref-42689

the potentially deadliest form of global hegemonic imperialism, ruthlessly asserting itself in our time, is inseparable on the material reproductive plane from the present historical phase of monopolistic economic development and the centralization of power corresponding to it. — location: 2954 ^ref-16318

it is conveniently disregarded, because of the complicitous subservience of the “willing allies,” who claim to be “sovereign democratic countries of the free world,” that in the global economic and financial domain the same kind of centralization of power prevails. — location: 2971 ^ref-30486

the move toward greater European unity is acceptable to the United States only “so long as it does not threaten U.S. global pre-eminence.” — location: 2976 ^ref-1558

emancipatory and self-emancipatory logic of labor, instituted by the totality of labor and not by any particular section or sociological strata of labor. — location: 2999 ^ref-43600

capital’s flight from the productive domain, due to the chronic failure of capital-accumulation in that field on the required scale. — location: 3048 ^ref-36752

productive labor, at our own stage of historical development, is of greater importance than ever before, no matter how hard the personifications of capital and their hired prize fighters might try to deny it in the name of advanced capitalism. — location: 3051 ^ref-27097

why did the wholesale deregulation of the global financial system, under American domination, come into being in the first place? — location: 3063 ^ref-44736

delusory self-justification that in the “value-added modern economy” the service sector and international finance represent the “vanguard of progress.” — location: 3070 ^ref-32241

only a fool could deny that the strategies of neoliberalism miserably and devastatingly failed. At the same time, of course, the accommodating response of the left also failed. — location: 3085 ^ref-63201

The only certainty is that the reformist accommodations of the past cannot succeed on a lasting basis. — location: 3093 ^ref-57619

at the time of a major crisis the temptation to opt for the line of least resistance is understandable and widespread. — location: 3095 ^ref-42376

the possibilities of this new opening can only be turned into the actuality of effective systemic change through the passionately dedicated hard work of strategically pursued organization and education. — location: 3104 ^ref-50346

It would take much more than even the best form of ideological clarification to resolve such divisions of interest among the great masses of people who are subordinated to the rule of capital, including their more privileged sections. — location: 3123 ^ref-53560

The great difficulty in this respect is the paralyzing contradiction between the immediate demands and pressures, often legitimate, and the comprehensive strategic framework in which they should be pursued. — location: 3127 ^ref-16582

the necessity to consign defensiveness, divisiveness, and the primary pursuit of sectional interests to the past is the absolutely vital condition for becoming able to assume this urgently required responsibility, without which none of the fundamental issues of the unfolding global structural crisis can be solved, — location: 3187 ^ref-18533