Simon Clarke was a British sociologist who made an immense contribution to Marxian thought and labor studies before his death in 2022. With his theoretical and empirical research, he set an example of how to analyze the developments of capitalism at different levels simultaneously and how to situate them in history.
Clarke’s most influential books, Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the State (1988) and Marx’s Theory of Crisis (1994), contain a number of key insights into the dynamics of capitalism. His distinctive perspective on the critique of political economy has much to offer as we try to grasp the current era of economic turmoil and ideological upheaval.
To understand capitalism, one must understand its innate contradictions, because it is these contradictions that shape it as a holistic and dynamic system while at the same time making it vulnerable. At the macro societal level, the most crucial contradiction for Clarke was the one “between capitalism’s tendency to develop the forces of production without limit and the need to confine that development within the limits of profitability.”
This “limit of the market” is what sets individual capitalists in competition with each other. Squeezing more value out of labor, expanding capitalist production across time and space, and further developing the forces of production does not overcome the barrier — it merely reproduces it at a higher level. This tendency of overproduction in capitalism is foundational for its repeated crises. Overproduction is both the cause and the…
Auteur: Gregoris Ioannou
