O'Connor on crisis theory, etc.

[Barbara Laurence]

My book, Accumulation Crisis (Basil Blackwell, 1983) synthesizes Marxist
political economy and a Gramscian ideology hegemony theory (with a tip of
the hat to other theories when warranted) to explain the slowdown in world
GDP growth rates after the first oil shock of the 1970s. Its focus is more
on the rate of exploitation, turnover time of capital, etc., than the
organic composition of capital. It raises issues, e.g., the size of the
consumption basket as well as its value content, not generally raised by
crisis theory. The first two chapters present a broad historical account of
the development of the proletariat and the difference this makes for
economic crisis. I develop the formula, first "crisis creates proletariat"
than later on "proletariat creates crisis."

Another book, The Meaning of Crisis (BB, 1984), Ch. Two, "Economic Crisis
Theory," esp. pp. 67-99 reviews Marx's theory of FROP and what assumptions
are needed to make it work; the relation between FROP and overproduction of
capital; and a lot of related matters.

Another book, not by me but by Sid Coontz, Unproductive Labor and Effective
Demand, is an underground classic and well-worth a radical economist's time
and effort. It presents convincingly a disproportionality theory of the
gathering crisis of the 1920s-1933. Too much value producing capacity
relative to demand appeared, Coontz argues, not because of overproduction
per se but because capital intensive Dept I increased faster then
(relatively) labor intensive Dept II. I note that this book is not on Jim
Devine's otherwise very helpful bibliography (in his "Causes of the 1929-33
Great Collapse).

As some of you folks know, I'm of the school that rejects "economic"
categories when and if they don't do double-duty as sociological
categories. That is, theoretical categories must be both
quantitative/economic and qualitative/sociological. This is why S/V is the
central category in Marxist thought. It is a quantitative measure of the
potential (or not) of the system to suffer a realization crisis; it's also
a qualitative measure of capital's power over labor. The greater the latter
(e.g., since late 1970s in the US), the higher will be S/V hence the
greater the problem of realizing value (solved in the 1980s by military
spending and hyper-consumerism and in the 1990s by hyper-consumerism (even
more than the 1980s) and exports (mainly).

Note the super-contradiction here, that Marx missed. The greater is
capital's political power over labor, cet. par., the greater the danger to
the capitalist economy, i.e., a contradiction between politics and
economics.