Historical Materialism Book Series-The Negative of Capital The Marxian Concept of Economic Crisis

The concept of crisis must be considered the guiding thread of Marx's economic work, despite the difficulties of its exposition. Grespan’s work demonstrates how, as the negative of capital, the meaning of crisis is enriched each time the concept of capital is given a more complex content.



The complex exposition of the concept of economic crisis in Capital and its preparatory manuscripts gave rise to different interpretations about the causes and modalities of crises themselves. Are their causes chronic under-consumption, inter-sectoral disproportionality or a fall in the profit rate? Are they merely possible or absolutely inevitable? Jorge Grespan’s work renews these traditional debates by treating the concept of crisis as the negative of the concept of capital. By means of a thoroughgoing exposition of Marx’s masterwork, his book reconstitutes the steps by which Capital’s exposition progressively enriches its content and form. To this end, dialectical categories such as measurelessness and relative necessity are mobilised and developed.