Marx's Legacy, Theory and Contemporary Capitalism

The 2008 financial crisis has challenged the merits of standard economic theories and sparked surprising references to Marxist analyses. A monetary economy is prone to crises, the interaction of competition with capital–labour relations launches relentless accumulation and over-accumulation crises exacerbate the built-in contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. Nevertheless, until now, these imbalances have not unfolded into its rapid and complete collapse. From the social and political struggles of labour and citizens, the 1929 crisis and finally the Second World War, new configurations emerge for the wage–labour nexus, the form of competition and the monetary and credit regime. These delineate an unprecedented accumulation regime, Fordism. In turn, Fordism enters a structural crisis and a dramatic change in institutionalized compromises favours a still different accumulation regime (finance-led) that evolved from one speculative boom to another till the 2008 American financial collapse. Thus the mobilization of Marx's foundational hypotheses by Régulation theory allows a better understanding than most alternative theories of major contemporary stylized facts: productivity slow-down and social polarization in mature economies, tensions between capitalism and democracy, new industrial capitalisms and limits to globalization.