The crisis of overaccumulation

Abstract

Far from being the recent and almost fortuitous phenomenon portrayed by most ongoing analyses,1 which prefer to focus on immediate causes, as well as those related to the choices of private and public agents, the current crisis is an ancient, systemic process, whose roots date back to the 1970. Also at that time, there were cyclical problems, such as the “oil crises”. But what began there, in fact, was a period of stagnation in investments, with a persistent drop in the average rate of profit and devaluation of capital in the United States economy, coordinator of the global commercial and financial system. The movement broad and deep only did not reveal its character on a global scale at that time, because Japan and Western Europe were still expanding as a result of the post-war recovery. And when stagnation also began in those parts, in the 1990s, the United States once again signaled a return to growth: it was the time of the “new economy”, based on the dizzying creation of robotics and information technologies; the “end of work”, which would have given way to science in the production of value; of “neoliberalism”, renewing the old belief in the self-regulation of markets, for which the State should play a minimal economic role, therefore privatizing public assets as much as possible.