Over-accumulation of capital as the basis of crises in the USA, Russia and the world

Abstract

The article provides a theoretical understanding of crisis as a manifestation of capital accumulation. The process of over-accumulation in the pre-crisis period becomes visible in a particular dynamics of interrelated indicators — growth of investments, employment, wages, and reduction in unemployment. Two options: (1) if investments grow faster than employment, this is an evidence of a large-scale impending crisis, (2) if at a similar or slower pace, then this is an evidence of a smaller scale of the crisis. Over-accumulation results in crisis as a sharp drop in the general rate of profit. Overcoming the crisis and restoring the values of the general rate of profit is accompanied by the depreciation of accumulated capital, reduction in investment, increase in unemployment, and drop in wages. The authors introduce the indicator of macroeconomic rate of return, an exoteric estimate of Marx’s general rate of profit, and present the calculation of macroeconomic rate of return in the US economy for the period of 1929–2018 and the Russian economy for the period of 1995–2018. The paper shows that the theory of crisis is confirmed by the statistics of world economic crises of the past three decades, US statistics for 1929–1970 and statistics of the Russian economy.