In my book Accumulation Crisis (Basil Blackwell, 1983), the skeleton of one of the main lines of analysis goes like this: 1. Marx sez, "Accumulation of capital is accumulation of proletariat" 2. He also sez, "Capital accumulates through crisis." 3. I say, 1. and 2. add up to "crisis creates proletariat." Most social histories of 19th and early 20th century crises and economic hard times tell the story of capital's struggle to get rid of undisciplined and too costly artisnal, craft, capitalist skilled labor, replacing them with machine operators, tenders, assembly line workers and of course the relevant machines. Here Dept. I takes on a grand new importance and the working class becomes more proletarian-like. Also during crises, more independent farmers, tradespeople, etc., lose their farms and businesses, with the result that more proletarians (quantitative sense of the word) are created. Through crises are European and North American producers proletarianized in the qualitative and quantitative sense, i.e., the labor force is recomposed to more closely resemble Marx's mass worker.
After documenting the way the "crisis created proletariat" from early 19th century to early 20th century, I then ask, "what did the proletariat do once it was created." Of course I couldn't resist the answer, "proletariat created crisis." This means many things, one of which is that the "economic crisis" of the 19th century and early 20th century were more systemic in origins, etc., than the long decline of growth of productivity and production rates since 1960s or 1970s -- in the West. To explain stagflation in the 1970s, for example, one must pay lots of attention to union contracts, labor laws, equal pay and comparable worth laws, environmental regulations, other struggles, than would be unnecessary to do, examining, e.g., the crisis of the 1890s (different places, different dates).
This is truly a rough and ready scheme, which requires not just economics but also sociology, politics, culture theory, etc., to make it work. The next question became, how did capital respond to all of this? The answer can be found in many LBO discussions re: outsourcing, increasing absolute surplus value, globalization, breaking the unions, the rise of new-liberalism as ideology and politics, etc., etc. In my thinking, this is capitalist power organized to weaken and break labors and popular power (and influence), which capital regarded not just as economically costly but subversive of the capitalist mode of production itself. All the many cost-push supply-side theories of crisis in the late 1960s and 1970s fit into this general perspective rather well.
But what about Brenner's account of the problem in NLR, which the editors extol to the heavens, i.e., that it was competition between capitals that is the key variable to understanding economic change. In the Marx world, this simply can't be, as competition is an expression of systemic laws of motion of capital as a whole. An answer to Brenner would have to begin by showing that it was the big jump in the rate of exploitation in the late 1970s (not to speak of costs of the natural elements of capital) and 1980s, that both gave new life to capital, and also inadvertently created more overproduction of commodities of capital. Thus the political changes are crucial in any explanation; the change favoring capital and disfavoring labor, often marginalizing labor's power. The story gets more complicated when we consider the movement of relative surplus value, created the workings of the system as a whole, in the 1980s and 1990s -- but here again it seems that the production of more relative surplus value, far from solving the problem of overproduction, exacerbated it -- as suggested by the "financial crisis" in Asia, underneath which as over-production of the type you get in a world with export-led economies.
Accumulation Crisis got some really excellent reviews, which at the time helped make the kind of work I (and you all) do really worthwhile. Unfortunately, sales were very weak and now it's out of print, bearing silent witness.
Jim O'Connor