Across the crises of modern capitalism

This essay provides a preliminary assessment of the transition from the 1929 crisis (and its solution) to the 2008 crisis. It points out how the modalities of the solution of the first crisis have paved the way for the recent crisis. The paper hangs the description and explanation of the whole process on a combination of the notions of business cycles and phases of development, a combination that allows the representation and explanation of the successive and various patterns of capitalism across the considered historical period. Thereafter we underline, mainly using the notion of functional imperatives, the important institutional transformations required in the passage from one type of capitalism to another, and the destabilizing effects that have resulted from the absence of those transformations in the wake of the emergence of conflictualconsumeristic capitalism and financial capitalism. On this analytical basis, we ground the widening of the recent crisis, showing a growing menace of long-term stagnation, contradictions and conflicts. Finally, the paper delineates some institutional reforms essential to overcoming the structural deficiencies inherited by conflictual-consumeristic capitalism and the dawning and no less damaging drawbacks that are being prepared by financial capitalism