Capitalist Crises and the State

Abstract

Capitalist development is a contradictory process prone to structural crises—the genesis, nature, and outcome of which are historically contingent and the resolution of which changes the terrain for the development of future crises. Crises are always historically specific; they occur within particular periods of capitalist development and must be theorized using the tools of historical materialsm in relation to the class and state matrices of that period. This article analyzes the specific class, state, and imperial configurations of the particular historical conjunctures in which the four structural crises of capitalism’s history have occurred from the late nineteenth century to the opening decades of the twenty-first century