Engels On Crisis Theory and Overproduction

[kidoftheblackhole]

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/w ... p/ch03.htm

We have seen that the ever-increasing perfectibility of modern machinery is, by the anarchy of social production, turned into a compulsory law that forces the individual industrial capitalist always to improve his machinery, always to increase its productive force. The bare possibility of extending the field of production is transformed for him into a similarly compulsory law. The enormous expansive force of modern industry, compared with which that of gases is mere child's play, appears to us now as a necessity for expansion, both qualitative and quantative, that laughs at all resistance. Such resistance is offered by consumption, by sales, by the markets for the products of modern industry. But the capacity for extension, extensive and intensive, of the markets is primarily governed by quite different laws that work much less energetically. The extension of the markets cannot keep pace with the extension of production. The collision becomes inevitable, and as this cannot produce any real solution so long as it does not break in pieces the capitalist mode of production, the collisions become periodic. Capitalist production has begotten another "vicious circle".

Interesting how the primary sources remain the clearest and also the most ripe for further research and development. Not so incidentally, this is included in the chapter titled Historical Materialism.

[blindpig]

A lot of the secondary/tertiary effects of this crisis come from efforts to circumvent or postpone it. Thus planned obsolescence, new models(sometimes twice a year!) 'new&improved!', all efforts to put lipstick on the pig.Also we might consider the push to maximize sales advertising to the very young or old as though they were prime adult(and thus max consumers). And so they sell us air and water. And ain't nothing worth fixing anymore except for the rich, all those really 'petty' booj fixers of things pushed out of their cottages....

And still they'll have crisis, but that won't stop them.

[Dhalgren]

The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch.

From the very first paragraph of the piece!