Abstract
The chapter offers an analysis of capitalist crisis through a reading and discussion of two seminal texts on capitalism, Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy [1943] and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation [1944]. These inspiring works on economic history and social theory offer profound insights into the nature of capitalist crisis. Although written in the mid-twentieth century many of the insights in these books are of relevance to the current situation as capitalism undergoes another revulsion. While the two authors were very different – Polanyi a left-wing critic of capitalism; Schumpeter a politically right-wing economist who favoured capitalism – both were influenced by Marx’s analysis of capitalism and have helped to shape the debate on the crisis of capitalism. Indeed, Schumpeter was convinced Marx was mostly right in his prediction of the end of capitalism and the triumph of socialism. The chapter begins with a brief account of the Marxist theory capitalism in order to contextualise the discussion of the two theorists.
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Notes
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For example, Jean Braudrillard, as in his famous 1972 book, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (Baudrillard 2019).
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Many of the central ideas in CSD were set forth in an essay in 1928 when he argued that the economic system of capitalism (characterized by private initiative, production for a market, and credit), tends to threaten the institutional survival of the capitalist civilization by undermining the social positions on which the ‘order’ rests (Schumpeter 1989 [1928]).
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See for example how it is relevant to the social and political struggles of the ‘Global South’ (Goodwin 2018).
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Acknowledgement
I am grateful to the editors of the volume, Albena Azmanova and James Chamberlain, for their invaluable comments on an earlier draft. Some of the discussion on Schumpeter and Polanyi draws from chapters 4 and 5 of Gerard Delanty and Neal Harris’s Capitalism and its Critics, 2023.
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Delanty, G. (2022). Capitalism and Crisis: Thinking Through Capitalist Crisis with Schumpeter and Polanyi. In: Azmanova, A., Chamberlain, J. (eds) Capitalism, Democracy, Socialism: Critical Debates. Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08407-2_10
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