ABSTRACT
The concept of crisis is key to understanding political struggles and economic transformations in the history of the Americas and ongoing developments. A crisis of under consumption results from insufficient effective demand in the market for the produced commodities. Neither the workers’ salaries, nor capital’s private consumption are high enough to counter the growing contraction between the production and the realization of surplus value. During and after the crisis of Fordism, hypermobile transnational financial capital successfully established itself as the dominant fraction and the primary driving force behind the global expansion of the world market under neoliberalism. The global financial crisis was in essence a crisis of the overaccumulation of financial capital, itself a response to the crisis of Fordism and the deflationary effects of neoliberal restructuring. The emergency measures taken by governments following the 2009 global recession rapidly turned the global financial crisis into a fiscal and political crisis as well as into a crisis of legitimacy and representation.
