ABSTRACT
Barthes, A Lover's Discourse Debates among Western Marxist scholars fill countless volumes. Few attempts have been made, however, to conceptualize the development of Western Marxist thought over the last century. Although theories of the breakdown of capitalism form a significant aspect of Western Marxist thought, the history of those theories has rarely been studied by those who made it. Paul Mattick provided abrief exception to this general rule in an article published in 1959. In this short piece, Mattick reviews and laments the confusion that surrounds the status of the laws of capitalism in Marxist thought. He criticizes those Marxists for whom 'the"law of value," as the economic counterpart of the dialectics, seems to assure the breakdown of capitalism.' When theorists like Grossmann assumed that the apparent development of capitalism is determined by its laws, 'Marx's critique of political economy became the ideology of the inevitability of socialism.' With the tendential laws of capitalism tied to actual events in capitalist economies, 'the theory of breakdown waxed and waned with the 138
capitalist movement from depression to prosperity, from relative stability to general crisis.' 1
According to Mattiek, then, the development of Marxist theories of break down has followed a pattern of growth and decline that paralleIs the eycle of eeonomie growth and decline in capitalism itself. According to this eharaeterization of the history of theories of breakdown, the theories flourished when capitalism faltered. Mattick's discernment of a cyclical pattern in the history of breakdown theories provides a useful charaeterization of the development of popular literature eoneerning the fate of capitalism. General, speeulative works on the breakdown of eapitalism have flourished during periods of pereeived and publieized eeonomic decline. Corey's popular articles are only one example of a genre of 'worry' literature that appeared during the depression of the 1930s. During the most reeent recession, this genre was revitalized in the United States, fed by the federal government, the popular press and by what seemed to be a national obsession with the state of the economy. The contemplation of economic crises became something of a popular pastime. Early in the recession, the 'collapse of capitalism' received cover-story treatment in Time magazine.
