It is then, through the impact of crisis on it, that the enterprise is forced to restructure so as to produce according to the law of value or to go under. The more enterprises there are that have been relatively protected in the past-that is, the higher the concentration and centralisation of capital-the greater will be the crisis when it eventually breaks.
But in the interim the giant firm can evade the crisis-and sometimes the interim can be a very long time. If many giant firms are able to do this for a period, the impression can arise that that system-or part of it-has become crisis free. What is not noticed is that the price it pays for avoiding crises is that it is there is no restructuring to offset the long-term downward pressure on profitability. Capitals avoid small crises, only to be hit, eventually, by a much greater one.
The other limit of capitalism?
There is a final point that has often been lost in expositions of Marx's ideas: his stress on the expansion of the "forces of production" has been interpreted as identification with economic growth at all costs. Yet in both the earlier and the later writings of Marx and Engels there is a keen awareness of the contradictory character of such growth within class societies in general and within capitalism in particular. They wrote in 1 845-6:
In the development of the productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being which, under existing relations, can only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive.61
Marx and Engels did not just view capitalism as generally destructive. They also provided the outlines of a critique of the particular ecological damage wrought by it, as writers like John Bellamy Foster have emphasised in recent years.62
Marx saw human beings as an integral part of the natural world. "Labour", he wrote:
is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material reactions between himself and
The Dynamics of the System
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