The Necessity of Capitalist Crises: Theory and Evidence from Greece, 2000 - 2012

The thesis focuses on the apparent mismatch between the recurring character of capitalist crises and the particularistic explanations proposed by academia, with a particular emphasis on Greece. Its research aim is to examine whether the contemporary Greek crisis was an unavoidable occurrence or the contingent outcome of poor regulation, policy making and planning. By deploying materialist dialectics and scientific abstraction, the thesis explores the concept of the unavoidability of crises and empirically tests the selected theoretical framework in the ailing Greek economy. From a theoretical standpoint, the thesis manages to turn the possibility of crises into actuality (reality), thus establishing their necessary character, by tracing the subsequent metamorphoses of the contradiction inherent to the commodity form in economic relations of higher order. Starting from the commodity form, which is the cell-form of capitalist production, the analysis gradually ascends to economic forms of growing complexity until it traces the contradiction between use-value and value at the level of enlarged capital reproduction, which is capitalism’s actual (real) modus operandi. From an empirical standpoint, the thesis tests Marx’s controversial Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall in both sides of capitalism’s cyclicity, namely growth (accumulation) and recovery. The results of the analysis corroborate the modern relevance of the law, pointing towards a deep structural crisis of overaccumulation characterised by very low profit rates. The main contribution of the thesis is that it interconnects all competing Marxist-informed theories of crises into a single, coherent framework which treats all potential causes of crises as manifestations of the antithesis inherent in the commodity form directly stemming from capitalism’s exploitative property relations. The thesis also develops a novel approach for the empirical evaluation of LTRPF that surpasses the measurement limitations peculiar to the traditional method and it also sheds light on the operation of the law at the under-researched phase of capitalist recovery.