A world economic crisis

A crise econômica mundial

Fabien Tarrit ()
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Fabien Tarrit: REGARDS - Recherches en Économie Gestion AgroRessources Durabilité Santé- EA 6292 - URCA - Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne - MSH-URCA - Maison des Sciences Humaines de Champagne-Ardenne - URCA - Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne

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Abstract: Karl Marx demonstrated that capitalism as a mode of production is a structurally unstable system; this has been illustrated by the recent period, especially the current crisis. This article is a contribution to a Marxian explanation of the current crisis, analyzing it as an expression of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall; it focuses on the first stage of the development of the crisis, understood as an outcome of the instability of capitalism and it identifies its specificities. Such instability is manifest through the recurrence of crises and we argue that each crisis emerges from the remedies used to counter the previous one and that it also contains the germs of the next crisis, all crises and instability being basically founded on the tendency of the rate of the rate of profit to fall, as first explained by Marx in Capital Volume III. This applies to world capitalism in general though we focus on its core economy, US capitalism. The first part deals with the immediate origins of the current crisis – the conditions of the period of growth from 2003 to 2006. The explosion of the real estate bubble in the summer of 2007 first led to a financial crash and then turned into a fully-fledged world-wide economic recession. It was, in turn, rooted in the remedies used to resolve the previous crisis. A substantial destruction of the least efficient capitals allowed a restoration of accumulation. This pattern of recurring crises is seen as the expression of a historical trend of overaccumulation of capital, which needs a subsequent devalorization. The second part investigates the methods that have been used to combat the crisis, in terms of public expenditure, of destruction of capital, and of national strategies.

Keywords: Debt; Rate of profit; Capitalism; Economic crisis of 2008; Exploitation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-02019051
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Published in Ciência e luta de classes , 2012, pp.15-26

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02019051

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