Anticipating the Dawn's Collapse: Capitalism, 19th Century
Capitalist growth is not permanent. According to Marx, the productive capacity expands dramatically, but workers' wages are suppressed by capitalists and the purchasing power of the working class is relatively limited. In other words, the ideal cycle of "if you make it, you can sell it" breaks down, and overproduction appears periodically. There is a fundamental contradiction within capitalism: the divergence between the logic of pursuing profit and market demand.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the seeds of such a crisis were actually realized: in 1873, a railroad boom and overinvestment led to bankruptcy and a prolonged depression (long depression), mainly in Europe and the United States. Fluctuations in the silver currency system, the collapse of bank credit, and overheated speculation in the stock and bond markets also exposed the fragility of capitalism.
According to Marxian theory, overaccumulation is a condition in which surplus capital "loses its place" due to excessive accumulation of capital, which exceeds overproduction and leads to a decline in the profit rate and stagnation of investment. This downward trend in profit margins destabilizes the capitalist recovery and is a structural factor that causes waves of depressions and recessions. Furthermore, capitalism attempts to expand markets through interstate and interregional excess capital exports and credit expansion, which itself causes imbalances and debt problems. In the end, Marx argued, crises are not accidental shocks but inevitable outcomes of the inherent dynamics of the capitalist system.
Thus, the complex interplay of factors such as overproduction, overaccumulation, declining profit margins, credit, and international imbalances, all of which are intertwined, inhabit the capitalist system with periodic and structural crises. Marx saw this as capitalism's self-contradiction and made overcoming it a radical ideological challenge.
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