An Outline Of A Model of the Capitalist Industrial Cycle

international | worker & community struggles and protests | opinion/analysis Thursday December 22, 2011 10:28 by Paddy Hackett paraichackett at gmail dot com

The General Rate Of Profit

The capitalist crisis can provide the working class with the opportunity to forcefully take power.

An Outline Of A Model Of The Capitalist Industrial Cycle
Paddy Hackett

The Capitalist Crisis

The capitalist economic system is a system of periodic interrupted reproduction of wealth. The interruption has a cyclical character. It is this disturbance that is known as the economic crisis or depression. Constant and variable capital invested is significantly reduced. There follows a significant decline in the scale of the reproduction of wealth and thereby the consumption of wealth by humanity. The result is increased poverty.

Capitalist crises tend to have an inherently periodic character entailing the indefinite sequential expansion and contraction of the reproduction of capital. The capitalist economic cycle involves sequential phases that regularly repeat themselves. This is the necessary and contradictory form by which capitalism regulates itself indefinitely. It is a form of regulation that is inherently unstable tending to generate political crises, wars and social revolution. Consequently capitalism’s sustained existence of capitalism cannot be guaranteed.

Crises have a unique form peculiar to capitalist society. Under capitalism the material destruction of the elements of production occur not as the cause but as the result of crisis. It is not because there are fewer workers engaged in production that a crisis breaks out. Instead fewer workers are engaged in production as a result of the break-out of a crisis. What appears to be the case is not the case. Reality is reversed. A capitalist crisis is a crisis of overproduction of exchange-values in the form of capital. On the market commodities fail to find buyers thereby rendering them unsaleable. Full employment is the exception rather than the rule under capitalism. At best full employment tends to have a cyclical character. Capitalist crises are general and have a global character.

The intrinsic contradiction of the commodity, the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, is externalised in the form of the splitting of the commodity into the commodity itself and money. The split creates the general possibility of capitalist crises. This contradiction means that to appropriate use-values one has to be able to buy them. To buy or sell one has to be a buyer or seller. Individuals exist, then, in the form of a buyer or a seller. They need only exist in this narrow abstract form. Power resides in one’s existence in the context of the constraining narrow abstract forms of buyer or seller. The consumption form plays a role in determining the character of the working class and the capitalist class. In this way individuals are reified as the personifications of buying, selling and consumption. Consequently success is circumscribed by the constraints of the narrow forms of buyer, seller and consumer. The worker as seller of labour power is only conceived from within that narrow form. This is why s/he is so summarily disregarded by the ruling class. His/her more humanist nature is thereby precluded, except marginally, from conceptions based on this socio-economic. One’s commercial value or status is significant not one's kindness, say, towards others. Consequently one is celebrated as a musician or artist because of one’s commercial success but not for one’s virtuosity and creativity. Since the worker’s existence is exclusively grounded on this constrained form, seller of labour power, his existence concerning every aspect of his being is conditioned by this narrow reified form. In past societies this was not necessarily the basis of economy. The separation between the commodity and its money equivalent facilitates the emergence of the systems of trade, credit and eventually capitalism. Accordingly these systems of reification conditioned the development of social being in such a way that they indelibly inscribe themselves on existing human conduct........................