[Pen-l] Michael Heinrich versus the crisis-mongerers

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

After having waded through Rosa Luxemburg, Henryk Grossman and various 
lesser figures in the course of a discussion of “crisis theory” on the 
Introduction to Marxism class, I was curious to see what Michael 
Heinrich had to say in an article titled “The Current Financial Crisis 
and the Future of Global Capitalism” on MRZine. I know next to nothing 
about Heinrich except that his work is highly touted by a Marxmail and 
LBO-Talk subscriber from Germany who uses the tag Angelus Novus. 
Heinrich has something of a following there apparently.

The thrust of Heinrich’s article is to make the case that Marxists are 
wrong to speak in terms of crisis leading to the downfall of capitalism. 
Not only is it theoretically incorrect, there is nothing in Marx’s 
writings to support such an idea—at least in their most mature phase. 
Marx supposedly expected the European-wide financial crisis of 1858 to 
unleash revolutionary movements, but was somewhat surprised to see that 
the capitalist system came out of the crisis “greatly strengthened”, to 
use Heinrich’s words. Heinrich writes:

"Marx learned a lesson: in capitalism, crises function as brutal acts of 
purification. The destruction wreaked by crises removes previous 
impediments to accumulation and frees up new possibilities for 
capitalist development."

This formula, of course, found its most refined expression in Joseph 
Schumpeter’s writings, a highly esteemed bourgeois economist who had 
read his Marx and who postulated the theory of “creative destruction” in 
“Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy”:

"Every piece of business strategy acquires its true significance only 
against the background of that process and within the situation created 
by it. It must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative 
destruction; it cannot be understood irrespective of it or, in fact, on 
the hypothesis that there is a perennial lull. . . ."
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