Thomas Meyer: Business as Usual - On the Ongoing Madness of the Capitalist Mode of Production.
First published in 2017 in exit! No. 14.
Business as Usual - On the Ongoing Madness of the Capitalist Mode of Production by Thomas Meyer [This article posted in 2017 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=aktuelles&index=8&posnr=865.]
It is gratifying when the real madness of capitalism is actually taken note of in the general analysis and specifically with regard to the crisis since 2007/2008, and a critique of the same is formulated based on this. This is attempted by Paul Mattick Jr.1 in his book "Business as Usual - The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism "2 written in 2011 and translated into German in 2012.
In this book, Mattick outlines the history of economic crises and argues for a concrete historical examination of capitalism. As a rule, however, crises are neither really explained nor understood, since one is not able to relate them to the internal history and to the logic of exploitation of capitalism. This is often because capitalism is perceived as natural anyway, and consequently no consideration is even given to looking at it historically.
Capitalism as imposition and crisis
The situation is well known: The so-called financial crisis began with the bursting of the real estate bubble in 2007/2008. Most commentaries were unanimous in their actual lack of understanding of capitalism. The economic science mainstream, mostly of neoclassical provenance3 , was rightly accused of neither being able to formulate reasonably reliable forecasts nor having plausible explanations for the current economic situation. Critics of neoliberalism, deregulation, etc. on the other hand, however, were similarly blind to history, as was Keynesian Paul Krugman, since he did not "deal [with] the reasons why Keynesian theory fell into disrepute in the 1970s" (25).