Lhe recent inauguration of libertarian Javier Milei as president of Argentina is one of the political monstrosities that the polycrisis world will likely continue to give birth to. However, the new president is already curbing anarcho-capitalism, without a state or central bank, for which he claimed responsibility. Rightly so, if we can say so, because he would have deprived himself of the two fundamental institutional levers by which capitalism recovers from its crises.
The assistance of the State and the mobilization of the monetary power of the central bank are indeed not simple crutches of contemporary capitalism, but powerful levers of transformation by which its mutation has thus far taken place in each of its crises. Capitalism generates crises in which it renews itself, adapts, each time deepening and germinating the ingredients of its next mutation when the next crisis arises, which will make people fear or hope – depending on – its collapse. , but will again provide it with something to mutate or deepen.
Thus, after the great depression of the 1930s and the Second World War, capitalism was able to reinvent itself through a Fordist mode of regulation, characterized by a relative compromise in the sharing of added value between capital and labor, a protective State and a credit money used to finance production. With the inflationary crisis of the 1970s, it did not collapse, but mutated towards its financialized version: the financial security largely replaced the commodity in the process of accumulation, the creation of shareholder value and the expectation of profitability financial instability came to degrade salary conditions, financial instability and economic instability became intertwined, and the process of accumulation continued without awareness of planetary limits.
“Antagonistic factors”
This financialized capitalism did not collapse with the crisis of 2007-2008. On the contrary, it emerged massively inflated – the total value of assets accumulated on the balance sheets of financial institutions in the financial system has doubled since 2008 – augmented by digital capitalism which has only accentuated the concentration of capital, weak productivity gains and devaluation of the labor force.
Why has the collapse of capitalism that Marx predicted not come? Because “antagonistic factors” (as the author of Capital in Book III) counterbalance it by slowing down the fall in the rate of profit. Reforms of the labor market and the pension system, Uberization, cryptocurrencies are the contemporary version.
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