crisis, france, capitalism, Great Britain, economic crisis, unemployment
Between slave societies, characterized not only by exploitation but by the possession of man by man, and capitalist society, where man is free in law but where the labour of those who
have only their arms exploited by the owners of the means of production. While capitalism, as the dominant mode of production, progressed during the 19th century thanks to the mechanism of international trade, capital exports and the brutal cynicism of colonialism, capitalism in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries was also punctuated by violent crises that put millions of workers out of work and led to the absurd situation of "too much abundance in poverty".
[...] The smaller mass of capital which results from this destruction will be more easily developed. It will be placed in conditions which will permit, when the economy recovers, a further rise in the average rate of profit. Whereas the crises of the Ancien Régime appeared as phenomena of sudden shortage, and even for millennia the notion of crisis was linked to underproduction and famine . the crises of the post-Revolutionary period always manifest themselves, except during the evolution of wars, as phenomena of superabundance, explosive in character, in other words also leading to profound social upheaval. [...]
[...] The most modern companies make considerable excess profits, which stimulates new investment and develops credit, speculation . Overproduction and the crash : As new investments increase society's overall production capacity, and thus the mass of goods thrown onto the market, the relationship between supply and demand changes, first imperceptibly, then more and more clearly. It now appears that some of the goods produced under the least favourable productivity conditions actually contain socially wasted labour time. These goods have become unsaleable at their production price. [...]
[...] The harvest was better than speculators had expected and the fall in prices ruined many traders in the autumn. Bankruptcies led to several banks suspending payments. Panic ensued and credit contracted. The cash on hand at the Bank of England halved in three months. On 25 October, the government authorised the Bank to derogate from the Peel Act of 1844, which imposed strict rules on the collateralisation of banknotes issued, and also recommended that the discount rate be raised to 8%. [...]
[...] Unemployment in the textile industry spread to the metal industry and then to the railways. Workers' misery was one of the causes of the Revolution that broke out in February 1848. The political crisis led to a stock market panic. The closure of the Stock Exchange from 23 February to 6 March led to the introduction of forced banknote pricing. The economic crisis worsened. Between March and June, unemployment in Paris reached 56% of the workforce employed at the start of the year. [...]
[...] The capitalist crisis is a crisis of overproduction of exchange values. It is explained by the insufficiency, not of production or of the physical capacity for consumption, but of paid consumption. A relative abundance of goods cannot find its equivalent on the market, cannot realise its value, remains unsaleable and leads to the ruin of its owners. The crisis of the capitalist epoch therefore presupposes the universalisation of commodity production. By definition, commodity production is general, encompassing most countries in the capitalist system of commodity production and exchange. [...]
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