| This question <1659|957> overall <950|952> Nazgul: <807|1003>. graded A– |
| Question 376: How does Marx define a crisis? |
| [951] Nazgul: The bourgeois, drunk. Marx defines a crisis as the expression of all the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. Primarily the expressions are seen in the contradiction between the social character of production and the capitalist form of appropriation. |
| On page 209 of Capital, Marx does outline some of these contridictions that lead to the possibility of crisis, “...use-value and value, between private labour which simultaneously manifest itself as directly social labour, and a particular concrete kind of labour which simultaneously counts as merely abstract universal labor.” |
| To better understand what leads to the possibility of a crisis, Marx gives a good example on page 236. Payments made by credit can cause a chain of events that when one individual in the link fails to make a payment or pays late, they break the chain making the exchange cycle incomplete. This outlines another contradiction, “The bourgeois, drunk with prosperity and arrogantly certain of himself, has just declared that money is a purely imaginary creation.” |
| Marx's definition of crisis is directly a result of a capitalistic society. James O'Connor, in Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism, makes the assertion that “capitalism requires material and social conditions under which exploitable labor power can be reproduced, conditions suitable to the profitable investment of capital.” It is the very nature of capitalism which pushes for overproduction that leads to many of the crises Marx mentions. |
| Hans: Marx said that a “world market crisis” is the expression of all the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, but for a basic more general definition of what a crisis is see my [957]. |
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