The Final Conflict: What Can Cause a System-Threatening Crisis of Capitalism?

The article compares the global economic crisis that began in 2007 with two that preceded it, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the recession of the 1970s. Such large-scale crises, which require institutional restructuring to overcome, are described as structural crises of accumulation using a Marxist analysis of capitalism, and their underlying dynamics are discussed according to social structure of accumulation theory. The crisis of the 2000s is seen as originating in the neoliberal, unregulated form of capitalism dominant in the United States.