First crisis of the twenty-first century

In 2005 at a conference in Beijing of radical scholars, a prominent North American Marxist told those who would listen that there would be no more major crises of capitalism. The end to crises was because financial capital had developed the means to ensure itself against all forms of risk and uncertainty. This spectacularly wrong embracement of the propaganda of financial capital required one to discard common sense, as well as Marx’s theory of value. That Marxists might take seriously the possibility that capitalist crises were a thing of the past is a tribute to the powers of obfuscation generated by the production and circulation of commodities. ¹ Capital can, indeed, insure and protect itself against many disasters, but those arising from its own international contradictions are not among them.