Economic Crises

This paper reviews changing Marxian conceptions of the generation and meaning of capitalist crises. In 1848 Marx and Engels expected increasingly severe cyclical downturns to produce increasingly active revolutionary proletarian organization. Their expectations were informed by the thesis that capitalism, like feudalism, would unleash growth in the forces of production incompatible with its own relations of production. While Marx's own hopes for the transformative effects of crises were soon quieted, various traditions from the 1870s into the twenty-first century took as their central task the demonstration that capitalist development inevitably produces ever-deepening crisis tendencies. The article reviews both traditional and variant frameworks with an eye to their effect on the anti-capitalist imagination. Do they suggest that class transformation might be possible and desirable here and now? Or is it possible only in a dimly imaginable future, requiring the sort of epoch-initiating assumption of state power originally envisioned in 1848?