ABSTRACT
The economic preconditions—disregarding for the political ones—can be formulated in general terms as follows: the major weight of industrial production must be shifted to large-scale mass production enterprise and the process of centralization has to reach a certain level. The historical rupture of 1917 resulted in a decisive change within the world economy by introducing a new element in the overall dynamic of the process, the political element. The mechanical fragmentation of the production process also shatters those ties that bound the individual subjects of work into a community of “organic” production. There is a distinction between simple commodity production and capitalist production which helps explain the phenomenon of the crisis. The cause of the crisis is not found in the disproportionality between production and consumption, but can be located within production itself, that is, in the basic contradiction between the forces and relations of production.
