Help: Overproduction and crisis

[Belisarius]

i'm making an essay on the economic news of the last months, but i need to find a text where Marx, or another marxist, explains as concise as possible the theory of overproduction leading to crises in capitalism and even more how capitalism solves those crises (new markets for example). where can i find these theses concretely, yet thoroughly?

[Muzk]

Try this (http://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/crisis-overaccumulation/)

[Belisarius]

it's already a good one to understand it, but i don't think i can use it in my text. the teacher is very strict on sources: for internet, i can only use belgian sites (since i'm describing the belgian economy). i have more freedom in books.

[turquino]

Ch24 of Anti-Duhring by Frederick Engels



We have seen that the ever increasing perfectibility of modern machinery is, by the anarchy of social production, turned into a compulsory law that forces the individual industrial capitalist always to improve his machinery, always to increase its productive force. The bare possibility of extending the field of production is transformed for him into a similar compulsory law. The enormous expansive force of modern industry, compared with which that of gases is mere child's play, appears to us now as a necessity for expansion, both qualitative and quantitative, that laughs at all resistance. Such resistance is offered by consumption, by sales, by the markets for the products of modern industry. But the capacity for extension, extensive and intensive, of the markets is primarily governed by quite different laws that work much less energetically. The extension of the markets cannot keep pace with the extension of production. The collision becomes inevitable, and as this cannot produce any real solution so long as it does not break in pieces the capitalist mode of production, the collisions become periodic. Capitalist production has begotten another "vicious circle".

As a matter of fact, since 1825, when the first general crisis broke out, the whole industrial and commercial world, production and exchange among all civilised peoples and their more or less barbaric hangers-on, are thrown out of joint about once every ten years. Commerce is at a standstill, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy, execution upon execution. The stagnation lasts for years; productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally filters off, more or less depreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again. Little by little the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit, and speculation, which finally, after break-neck leaps, ends where it began — in the ditch of a crisis. And so over and over again. We have now, since the year 1825, gone through this five times, and at the present moment (1877) we are going through it for the sixth time. And the character of these crises is so clearly defined that Fourier hit all of them off when he described the first as crise plethorique, a crisis from plethora.

In these crises, the contradiction between socialised production and capitalist appropriation ends in a violent explosion. The circulation of commodities is, for the time being, stopped. Money, the means of circulation, becomes a hindrance to circulation. All the laws of production and circulation of commodities are turned upside down. The economic collision has reached its apogee. The mode of production is in rebellion against the mode of exchange, the productive forces are in rebellion against the mode of production which they have outgrown.

[Sogdian]

The Laws of Motion of the Capitalist Mode of Production
internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article288

Marx's Theory of Crisis
internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article289


ps you might also look at Capital's chapter on Accumulation
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch23.htm

[Muzk]

Try finding some belgian sources on past crisises, some economical facts, some kind of belgian archive...

I found this "archive", it isn't written in belgian language though, tell your teacher to learn english... (http://www.archaeolink.com/country_study_belgium.htm)

Belgium in the crisis of 2008/09... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932009_Belgian_financial_crisis)

All you need is your brain, you are the marxist you need.. I hope. By the way, new markets don't solve crisis, that's what bourgeoise politicians say. Massive deflation solves crisis. This time they did a huge inflation of money they stuffed into the banks asses, yet what do you see? Unemployment, closing of factories etc... the forced inflation caused the same thing the forced deflation did: Screw us people up, giving the rich ones more cash, and give them the opportunity to now buy the "losers" of the crisis, making the big ones monopolies grow.

Their capital loses a lot of its initial worth, that's the way the winning capitalists can now go company shopping, hence why it's a deflation.


Meh, go the easy way, use the source of belgian economics/the crisis one and create a marxist analysis of it, or, the hard way, read marx' crisis theory, I havn't read it myself, but I guess it's the most straight forward if you're looking for a marxist to explain the crisis of capital (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch13.htm) and use whatever you might learn reading it on the recent crisis...

Oh and if you're planning on using marxism as a means of describing how they solve crisis, you should describe every single aspect since teachers tend to be neo-classicals :P