[lbo-talk] Do crises threaten the capitalist system directly ?

[c b]

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois
society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of
property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of
production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able
to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his
spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is
but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against
modern conditions of production, against the property relations that
are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule.
It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical
return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial,
each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only
of the existing products, but also of the previously created
productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there
breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed
an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds
itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if
a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of
every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be
destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much
means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The
productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further
the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the
contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which
they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they
bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the
existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society
are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does
the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced
destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the
conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the
old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and
more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises
are prevented.

^^^^^
CB: Clearly here Marx and Engels portray period crises as tending to
directly lead to the end of capitalism, not as normal reinforcement of
the system.