ABSTRACT
This essay is about the present crisis of the institutions, structures, and policies that made possible the remarkable growth of the capitalist world economy for more than three decades following World War II. It deals with the weakening of the dollar, instability of the international financial system, extreme indebtedness of countries, firms and governments, and deterioration of institutions like the IMF and GATT. We maintain that the present predicament also involves a crisis of the general mechanisms of capitalist regulation, i.e. the law of value and its pseudo-substitutes, such as state intervention and oligopolistic administration. In sum, we argue that the crisis that capitalism faces at the present time is general - economic, political, and institutional - and that it results from the same mechanisms which stimulated rapid growth in previous decades. In this sense, the present imbroglio is a kind of “auto-immune” response, or in other words, it is due to blockage of the sanitizing action of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”.
KEYWORDS:
Value theory; capitalist system