to work harder, even though in doing so this cuts into the market for consumer goods produced by other capitalists. We have seen how these elements came together to produce the great slump of the inter-war years, renewed crisis in the mid-1 970s, and the long drawn out Japanese crisis of the 1990s. We saw also how they produced the debt economy bubble culminating in the great crash of 2007-9. We will see this happen again repeatedly, in one form or other, in the decades ahead.
In some important ways, the system is even more chaotic than in Marx's account. The very size of the units that make it up means that it has lost some of its old flexibility. The destruction of some capitals through periodic crises which once gave new life to those that remained now threatens to pull these down as well. Life support systems provided by the state may be able keep the system from complete collapse but cannot restore it to long-term vigour. At best they provide a feverish spell of brief exhilaration before yet another collapse. And the cost of providing the life support systems sooner or later stretches the resources of the state close to breaking point.
Modern states are creatures of the capitalist system, evolving to service the needs of the geographical clusters of capitals that constitute it. The more these clusters depend on their relations with the rest of the global system, the more they need the power of states to provide for their interests within it. Yet each state can only achieve this goal by pressurising other states, and in the process adding to the instability of the system as a whole. The measures national states take to aid the capitals based within them during a crisis necessarily infringe on the interests of capitals based in other states, increasing the instability still further. Their significance is not limited to a particular economic crisis. They provide a foretaste of what the rest of the 2 1 st century is going to be like.
Capitalism is a restless system. Whether in boom or slump, in peace or war, in a great city or the remote countryside, it never stands still. Competitive accumulation remoulds everything it touches and then, when it has hardly finished, remoulds it all again. The very speed of change itself has enormous importance. It means that the relative economic weights of the different states within which the units of capital are based are continually in flux, just as the states have to try to intervene to protect their capitalists from the recurrent convulsions of the global system.
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