I should mention that I will have something to say about "crisis
theory" in the wrap-up of my discussion of this section of the
Introduction to Marxism online class that I have organized.
Basically, I will argue that it is a mistake to adopt the national
economy as a model, even though Marx did that for obvious reasons in
Capital. He was trying to look inside the hood, so to speak, and show
how a classic bourgeois economy operated in Great Britain. However,
when you bracket out the rest of the world, which was not Marx's
intention, you really lose track of the fact that capitalism is a
*global system*. I first became aware of this problem when writing
about the Brenner thesis. It makes no sense to talk about the rise of
capitalism in Great Britain without taking Jamaica and Indian into account.
By the same token, you really need to look at the entire global
system when you write about capitalist crisis, which I think David
Harvey has done to his credit. In my opinion, the notion that an
increasing organic composition of capital leads mechanically to a
falling rate of profit is a function of seeing things in a strict
nation-state framework. So, for example, it matters little if
Japanese auto factories are highly automated if they can sell cars in
foreign markets, as is the case today. Labor is the source of value,
but you have to take global markets into account when writing about
capitalist crisis. Indeed, the problem today would be diminishing
markets for goods produced in heavily mechanized factories. That is
why it was so important to open up the USSR and China. Does this
sound like the point that Harvey was making? I guess so.
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