ABSTRACT
Capitalism’s proneness to crises was apparent from its earliest days. Marx’s analysis identified the key reason: capitalism was a system aiming to produce not the goods and services people needed, but value itself. Such value or capital accumulation was a quixotic and contradictory enterprise, involving unjust exploitation and anarchic competition, contradictions that led to crises. However, Marx’s work remained incomplete. He did not fully develop another point: capitalism required practically impossible social arrangements that were perpetually close to failing or breaking down and burdened sociality itself to breaking point while also involving societies in competition and conflict. This essay outlines how the contradictions of value production were analysed by Marx and later critics of capitalism such as Keynes. It then discusses the additional mechanisms of crises inhering in its impossible demands on society and nature to outline the sheer variety of crises that arise from capitalist value production and the social fragility it requires.
