World Market Crises

[Rakesh Bhandari]

The importance of Grossmann's discovery of the shortage of the mass 
of surplus value--why I called it the window on the world of capitalist
dynamics in my last post-- has been well explained by Paul Mattick, Jr :

"By 'crisis Marx means here what elsewhere he calls 'particular crises
(*particular* in their content and extent)" in which the 'eruptions
are only sporadical, isolated, and one-sided', in contrast with 'world
market crises', in which 'all the contradictions of bourgeois  production
erupt collectively'. In a system in which goods are produced as
commodities offered for sale by individual capitals 'too much may be
produced in individual spheres and *therefore* too little in others;
partial crises can thus arise from disproportionate production
(proportionate production is, however, always the result of
disproportionate production on the basis of competition.')
Interdepartmental disproportionalities, like economic disequilibria
generally, are nomral to capitalist reproduction. As Paul Mattick [Sr]
explains, because such disproportionalities, like maldistributions of
capital among branches of production generally,

'can also in turn be overcome by way of these same crises, the producess
of reprocution can be represented [in the schemes] as crisis free, just as
equilibrium of supply and demand, which in real life does not exist, can
be imagined. Crises of this kind, arising exclusively from the
disproportionalities from the system, are only an expression of the
anarchy of capitalism and not of the exploitative character of the
relations of production that underlie this anarchy; they are resolved,
therefore, by the redistribution of surplus value, without the production
of additional surplus value.' [quoted from Economic Crisis and Crisis
Theory]

[Mattick Jr continues]" To explain world market crises, the system-wide
economic convulsions in which the duality of use-value and value becomes
visible in the form of a conflict between human needs and the demands of
capital accumulation, calls in contrast for an analysis focusing on the
conditions of surplus value production (treated in Volume One [of
Capital]) and the relations between surplus value produced and the
quantity required for accumulation (discussed in Volume Three). 

Quoted from Mattick Jr "Economic Form and Social Reproduction" in The
Circulaton of Capital, ed. Chris Arthur and Geert Reuten
(St Martins, 1988), p. 29

rb