Abstract

This essay is about the present crisis of the institutions, structures, and policies
that made possible the remarkable growth of the capitalist world economy for more than
three decades following World War II. It deals with the weakening of the dollar, instability of
the international financial system, extreme indebtedness of countries, firms and governments,
and deterioration of institutions like the IMF and GATT. We maintain that the present predicament
also involves a crisis of the general mechanisms of capitalist regulation, i.e. the
law of value and its pseudo-substitutes, such as state intervention and oligopolistic administration.
In sum, we argue that the crisis that capitalism faces at the present time is general
– economic, political, and institutional – and that it results from the same mechanisms which
stimulated rapid growth in previous decades. In this sense, the present imbroglio is a kind of
“auto-immune” response, or in other words, it is due to blockage of the sanitizing action of
Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”.

JEL Classification: P10; D46.