Tag Archives: circuit of capital

Abstract:
An economic crisis manifests itself in many different forms simultaneously: stock market crashes, housing market crashes, over capacity, unemployment, etc. For every aspect of the crisis there is some theorist who mistakes this surface appearance for the inner mechanism of crisis. But a proper analysis of crisis needs to have some reason for selecting some phenomena as causes and others as effects. There must be a proper ordering of the relations between different economic factors in order for our analysis to avoid being arbitrary and piecemeal. Marx gives us a very clear, though complex, ordering of these relations. Interestingly enough the misunderstanding of Marx’s method, of the proper relation between different aspects of his value theory, is also one of the main reasons that many have dismissed the labor theory of value and Marx’s theory of crisis in the first place. This paper will seek to explain and defend Marx’s “order of operations” in hopes that this can shed valuable light onto what exactly differentiates Marx’s theory of capitalism from others. Continue reading →