I am at the end of this book. I recommend it. You just need some updated figures while you are reading.
The Globalisation of Production, Super-Exploitation and the Crisis of Capitalism
Two major factors cause capitalist crisis: declining profitability and overproduction. I am not convinced that the latter is a major factor. The problem is not that capitalism produces too much, but that what it is produced is not provided to the global population. Half of the world population is unable to buy what is produced or buys too little of what is produced because it is too poor.
That means that lack of investment in large swathes of the world–Latin America and South Africa, Africa, parts of the Middle East and Asia–unemployment, precarity, etc. deprives half of the world from getting access to what is produced. Those who produce get little or almost nothing from what they produce.
According to the WHO “around 45% of deaths among children under 5 years of age are linked to undernutrition. These mostly occur in low- and middle-income countries.”
Capitalist production also wastes or destroys huge amounts of what it generates.
It not a problem of underconsumption, either, for in the advanced capitalist countries, many people ‘consume’ more than what they need and needs themselves are manufactured. 900 million tonnes of food are thrown away every year. UK, for example wastes more food than any other European country.
Instead of the overproduction argument, I think that exploring combined and uneven development of capitalism is crucial in understanding both capitalist crisis and capitalist form of development. While exploitation takes place within the production process, crisis are generated by the decline of profit but also by the way capitalism develops nationally, regionally and globally.
Determinism should be avoided. Stating that the capitalist crisis that ‘began’ in 2007/08 is ‘capitalism’s final crisis’–in the title of the book and on p. 316–is a deterministic statement. After all, despite the crises, wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, capitalism survived. In fact, it has consolidated its system globally. If the history of capitalism tells a thing, it is its dynamism albeit at a cost of surviving its cyclical crises. In addition, there has not been any force or an alternative in the last 40 years that has challenged the system.
Although many in the West question ‘democracy’, capitalism as a whole is rarely questioned.
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