Karl Marx was a thinker of crisis. But in what sense was he a theorist of crisis? In what sense did he propound something that might legitimately be called a ‘crisis theory’? The question may seem an odd one. After all, although there is no one text by Marx specifically dedicated to the topic, it is generally held to be pervasive throughout his economic and political writings from the late 1840s onwards; indeed, to constitute their very rationale – the energizing demonstration of the necessity of social change, via the demonstration of the tendency to crisis inherent in the capitalist mode of production itself. Marxists have long debated the meaning and significance of the ‘crisis theory’ contained in Marx’s passages on this topic – in particular, the question of whether or not it constitutes a theory of breakdown or collapse (Zusammenbruch). This question was at the heart of the revisionist controversies around the time of the First War World, for example, in which both Rosa Luxemburg (The Accumulation of Capital, 1913) and, later, Henryk Grossman (The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, 1929) upheld the theory of breakdown against what were held to be ‘revisionist’ positions.
The revival of Marxist theory in Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s brought a corresponding revival of interest in crisis theory.
