ABSTRACT
Most commentators refer to the global capitalist crisis in economic terms and date it to the US sub-prime loan debacle that began in mid-2007, followed by the global financial collapse of September 2008 and “The Great Recession.”1 The crisis that exploded in 2008 springs from contradictions in global capitalism that are expressed in immanent crisis tendencies and in a series of displacements over the past three decades that had served to postpone a “day of reckoning.” I attempt in this chapter to situate the causal origins of the global crisis in over-accumulation and also in contradictions of state power. The system cannot expand because the marginalization of a significant portion of humanity from direct productive participation, the downward pressure on wages and consumption worldwide, and the polarization of income have reduced the ability of the world market to absorb world output. This is therefore a crisis of social polarization, that is, of social reproduction; the system cannot meet the needs or assure the survival of millions of people, perhaps a majority of humanity. At the same time, given the particular configuration of social and class forces and the correlation of these forcers worldwide, national states are hard-pressed to regulate transnational circuits of accumulation and offset the explosive contradictions built into the system.
