The Classical Theory and Its Critique

There is reasonable doubt about Marx’s final intentions concerning the ‘general law of capitalist accumulation’. The Communist Manifesto and Value, Price and Profit make an intriguing pair: they are texts written near the beginning and near the end, respectively, of Marx’s productive lifetime, and both suggest that the core of the process lies in the struggle between the two defining classes, capitalists and workers. In the Manifesto, the capitalists ‘create their own gravediggers’: in their frenzied (but absolutely necessary) pursuit of profits and power, they call into existence the class with ‘radical chains’, the proletariat. This class, through its experience of daily struggle and periodic crisis, both grows and matures — industrially, politically, educationally — gradually acquiring the capacity to take power and reshape society along new lines. The long-term balance of class forces, then, shifts in favor of the workers; this is the basis of structural crisis in capitalism.