The World in Economic Crisis: The Twilight of Capitalism

This chapter is the pinnacle of our effort to show the relevance of Capital for the world in the twenty-first century. Its subject matter is the state of the world economy in the aftermath of the so-called “global financial crisis” of 2008–2009. We characterise this as a Great Depression in the lineage of the 1873–1896 Long Depression and the Great Depression of the 1930s. We contend (1) that great depressions are peculiar to the epoch of the socialisation of labour and of the means of production, leading to an ever-growing incapacity of the capitalist mode of production to regulate the economy through the market and private appropriation in the face of the socialisation of productive forces and (2) that they are thus an expression of the historic decline of capitalism. We first develop a survey of economic theories and show the superiority of Marxist theory in the comprehension of crises under capitalism. We then delve into different Marxist theories of crisis. We rely on the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall for understanding the post-2008 crisis. The last sections establish the link between this great depression and the historical decline of capitalism.