Crisis of capitalism

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani sees the current crisis as the structural crisis Marx foretold, which the Second World War had postponed. He presents it as Hamlet's "old mole": the world of production, thought to be buried, returns to the surface and brings down the certainties of the liberal-libertarian counter-revolution described by Clouscard1. He stresses that for forty years capitalism has become anti-productivist and financial, and recalls that Marx already analysed speculation and public debt, through which capital holds the indebted1. He argues that in the absence of an organised Marxist response, and of a Marx tied to Hegel and dialectics, the crisis benefits the far right2. In March 2020, he puts in the foreground not the lockdown but the economic crisis that is beginning. He sees in it an invariant, the repetition of the crises of capital, to which only massacres have so far granted a reprieve, from 1914 to Weimar and the 1930s: "from the malady of the century to the century of evil"3. In 2021, he draws on debt and the American situation to link the crisis once again to the danger of war4.

1. 1Marx Plage 1/21 Feb 2016
2. 2K comme Karl25 Dec 2014
3. 3Debussy27 Mar 2020
4. 49 #12 Comment des sciences de l'histoire peuvent-elles être réelles?14 Jan 2021

Introduction produced automatically from the 4 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.