POLITICAL-ECONOMIC CRISIS OF CAPITALISM AND THE CRISIS OF ITS ECONOMIC THEORY Cover Image

Političko-ekonomska kriza kapitalizma i kriza njegove ekonomske teorije
POLITICAL-ECONOMIC CRISIS OF CAPITALISM AND THE CRISIS OF ITS ECONOMIC THEORY

Author(s): Bogomir Kovač
Subject(s): Economy
Published by: Fakultet političkih znanosti u Zagrebu
Keywords: criticism of political economy; capitalism; crisis of economic theory

Summary/Abstract: The author demonstrates the non-existence of a consistent theory of market and of the modern capitalist system. Only a conceptual analysis is possible which is more revealing of the methodologies of various theoretical trajectories and a comparative analysis of different viewpoints and theoretical contradictions in relation to historical reality. The fundamental theoretical accomplishment of Strpić’s analysis is that it offers a fertile core of clarification of market society and capitalism. The search for modern political economy opens up three aspects of the crisis of capitalism and of its economic theory. The political strategy of laissez faire in the beginning of the 20th century brought about the Great Depression (1929-1933), and the theoretical and political turn to Keynesianism (1936). In the 1970s the great stagflation (1971-1980) cleared the path for the neo-liberal theoretical counterrevolution (1972). In the period of the Great Recession (2007-2012) the necessity is imposed on us of a new theoretical turn in the direction of anti-neo-liberalism. Market economy and its invisible hand cannot be simply suppressed into closed out theoretical systems; the economists overlooked precisely this simplification and abstraction from real relations. Strpić’s theoretical project of the Modern Normal and matrix-capitalism makes it possible to read in a new way the incommensurability of theoretical paradigms, not as a unified theory but as a developmental project which is prerequisite for explaining the character of the present crisis and the dynamic development of the modern transformation of capitalism.

  • Issue Year: XLIX/2012
  • Issue No: 01
  • Page Range: 105-125
  • Page Count: 21
  • Language: Croatian