RJ: What kind of economic crisis is the current one?



EL: Marx distinguishes between collective and particular crises, saying that, �In world market crises, all the contradictions of bourgeois production erupt collectively; in particular crises (particular in their content and in extent) the eruptions are only sporadical [sic], isolated and one-sided.�[1] No crisis in the history of capitalism has really deserved to be called a collective crisis so much as the one that has become manifest since fall 2008. It is an entire system of partial crises that mutually create, overlap, and build upon one another.



Above all, two main layers have to be looked at separately. First there is a structural crisis of real value production. This has been ongoing below the surface since the 1970s, has never been overcome, and in fact cannot be overcome because is it caused by the fact that productivity since then has been too high to keep the process of capital valorization going. Capital has to reproduce itself because otherwise it ceases to be capital and for that purpose a continuously growing workforce has to be utilized to produce commodities. But at the same time, competition is driving an unstoppable productivity race that at its core leads to the permanent replacement of labor with physical capital. That is the fundamental internal contradiction in the capitalist mode of production that ultimately has to turn on the mode of production itself. Specifically, if productivity is so high that huge masses of labor power are made superfluous, that jeopardizes the very basis of capital valorization. That is precisely what is at the core of the fundamental structural crisis that the global capitalist system has found itself in since the end of the postwar boom.



RJ: What is the other essential component of the crisis?



NT: The crisis that we just described has been covered up by the bloat in the financial markets for decades. On the level of our entire society, capital accumulation went back into overdrive after the crises of the 1970s and the global economy managed to start growing again. That growth was no longer supported by actual production of value through the use of labor, however, but by explosive increase in capital within the finance industry. While the finance industry was circulating more and more property titles (debts, stocks, derivatives, etc.), it managed to transform the sleight of hand known as future value, meaning value that has not actually been produced yet and may never be produced, into abstract wealth.



But this reproduction of capital through anticipation of value, which has long since reached astronomical proportions, has itself fallen into crisis. Although the permanent increase in property titles, which capitalism can no longer survive without, is operating in the same way that it always has and is even picking up speed, that�s only because that job is now being done by governments and above all by central banks. States drive up their debt and central banks guarantee private banks excessive credit at what amounts to zero interest while simultaneously buying up government bonds that no one else will buy. In fact we�re slowly reaching the limits to this, the euro crisis being one example.