The Materialist Conception of the Crisis

Abstract

In this chapter, the theoretical foundations of the conception of crisis are explained. The crisis is viewed as a necessary moment of the process of capital accumulation, this need arising from both its inevitability and its indispensability. The author thus establishes the bases from which to analyze the Great Recession in Spain: methodological aspects, the role of production and the law of value, and the place that the crisis occupies in the economic thought. The crisis is shown as an absolutely central reality, for which the author claims the relationship that the theory of crisis has with the foundations of economic theory—in particular, with a materialist approach that highlights the fundamental structures of the capitalist system. These methodological foundations reveal as well the deep and radical distance that separates this theory from other accounts of the possibility of crisis.