Falsework Booklet v.9(1)

From Gabriel García-Márquez, 100 Years of Solitude.
(the plague as a parable for themes of crisis, memory, neoliberalism, and the dangerous possibilities for inventing something otherwise)
One night about the time that Rebeca was cured of the vice of eating earth and was brought to sleep in the other children's room, the Indian woman, who slept with them awoke by chance and heard a strange, intermittent sound in the corner. She got up in alarm, thinking that an animal had come into the room, and then she saw Rebeca in the rocker, sucking her finger and with her eyes lighted up in the darkness like those of a cat. Terrified, exhausted by her fate, Visitacion recognized in those eyes the symptoms of the sickness whose threat had obliged her and her brother to exile themselves forever from an age-old kingdom where they had been prince and princess. It was the insomnia plague.

Cataure, the Indian, was gone from the house by morning. His sister stayed because her fatalistic heart told her that the lethal sickness would follow her, no matter what, to the farthest corner of the earth. No one understood Visitacion's alarm. "If we don't ever sleep again, so much the better," Jose Arcadio Buendia said in good humor. "That way we can get more out of life." But the Indian woman explained that the most fearsome part of the sickness of insomnia was not the impossibility of sleeping, for the body did not feel any fatigue at all, but its inexorable evolution toward a more critical manifestation: a loss of memory. She meant that when the sick person became used to his state of vigil, the recollection of his childhood began to be erased from his memory, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of his own being, until he sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past. Jose Arcadio Buendia, dying with laughter, thought that it was just a question of one of the many illnesses invented by the Indians' superstitions. But Ursula, just to be safe, took the precaution of isolating Rebeca from the other children.

After several weeks, when Visitacion's terror seemed to have died down, Jose Arcadio Buendia found himself rolling over in bed, unable to fall asleep. Ursula, who had also awakened, asked him what was wrong, and he answered: "I'm thinking about Prudencio Aguilar again." They did not sleep a minute, but the following day they felt so rested that they forgot about the bad night. Aureliano commented with surprise at lunchtime that he felt very well in spite of the fact that he had spent the whole night in the laboratory gilding a brooch that he planned to give to Ursula for her birthday. They did not become alarmed until the third day, when no one felt sleepy at bedtime and they realized that they had gone more than fifty hours without sleeping.

"The children are awake too," the Indian said with her fatalistic conviction. "Once it gets into a house no one can escape the plague."

They had indeed contracted the illness of insomnia. Ursula, who had learned from her mother the medicinal value of plants, prepared and made them all drink a brew of monkshood, but they could not get to sleep and spent the whole day dreaming on their feet. In that state of hallucinated lucidity, not only did they see the images of their own dreams, but some saw the images dreamed by others. It was as if the house were full of visitors. Sitting in her rocker in a corner of the kitchen, Rebeca dreamed that a man who looked very much like her, dressed in white linen and with his shirt collar closed by a gold button, was bringing her a bouquet of roses. He was accompanied by a woman with delicate hands who took out one rose and put it in the child's hair. Ursula understood that the man and woman were Rebeca's parents, but even though she made a great effort to recognize them, she confirmed her certainty that she had never seen them. In the meantime, through an oversight that Jose Arcadio Buendia never forgave himself for, the candy animals made in the house were still being sold in the town. Children and adults sucked with delight on the delicious little green roosters of insomnia, the exquisite pink fish of insomnia, and the tender yellow ponies of insomnia, so that dawn on Monday found the whole town awake. No one was alarmed at first. On the contrary, they were happy at not sleeping because there was so much to do in Macondo in those days that there was barely enough time. They worked so hard that soon they had nothing else to do and they could be found at three o'clock in the morning with their arms crossed, counting the notes in the waltz of the clock. Those who wanted to sleep, not from fatigue but because of the nostalgia for dreams, tried all kinds of methods of exhausting themselves. They would gather together to converse endlessly, to tell over and over for hours on end the same jokes, to complicate to the limits of exasperation the story about the capon, which was an endless game in which the narrator asked if they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and when they answered yes, the narrator would say that he had not asked them to say yes, but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and when they answered no, the narrator told them that he had not asked them to say no, but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and when they remained silent the narrator told them that he had not asked them to remain silent but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and no one could leave because the narrator would say that he had not asked them to leave but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and so on and on in a vicious circle that lasted entire nights.

When Jose Arcadio Buendia realized that the plague had invaded the town, he gathered together the heads of families to explain to them what he knew about the sickness of insomnia, and they agreed on methods to prevent the scourge from spreading to other towns in the swamp. That was why they took the bells off the goats, bells that the Arabs had swapped them for macaws, and put them at the entrance to town at the disposal of those who would not listen to the advice and entreaties of the sentinels and insisted on visiting the town. All strangers who passed through the streets of Macondo at that time had to ring their bells so that the sick people would know that they were healthy. They were not allowed to eat or drink anything during their stay, for there was no doubt but that the illness was transmitted by mouth, and all food and drink had been contaminated by insomnia. In that way they kept the plague restricted to the perimeter of the town. So effective was the quarantine that the day came when the emergency situation was accepted as a natural thing and life was organized in such a way that work picked up its rhythm again and no one worried any more about the useless habit of sleeping.

It was Aureliano who conceived the formula that was to protect them against loss of memory for several months. He discovered it by chance. An expert insomniac, having been one of the first, he had learned the art of silverwork to perfection. One day he was looking for the small anvil that he used for laminating metals and he could not remember its name. His father told him: "Stake." Aureliano wrote the name on a piece of paper that he pasted to the base of the small anvil: stake. In that way he was sure of not forgetting it in the future. It did not occur to him that this was the first manifestation of a loss of memory, because the object had a difficult name to remember. But a few days later he discovered that he had trouble remembering almost every object in the laboratory. Then he marked them with their respective names so that all he had to do was read the inscription in order to identify them. When his father told him about his alarm at having forgotten even the most impressive happenings of his childhood, Aureliano explained his method to him, and Jose Arcadio Buendia put it into practice all through the house and later on imposed it on the whole village. With an inked brush he marked everything with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan. He went to the corral and marked the animals and plants: cow, goat, pig, hen, cassava, caladium, banana. Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use.


From Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (Autonomedia 2004), pp. 44-47.
A turning point in the course of the medieval struggles was the Black Death, which killed, on an average, between 30% and 40% of the European population (Ziegler 1969: 230). Coming in the wake of the Great Famine of 1315-22, that weakened people's resistance to disease (Jordan 1996), this unprecedented demographic collapse profoundly changed Europe’s social and political life, practically inaugurating a new era. Social hierarchies were turned upside down because of the levelling effects of the widespread morbidity. Familiarity with death also undermined social discipline. Confronted with the possibility of sudden death, people no longer cared to work or to abide by social and sexual regulations, but tried to have the best of times, feasting for as long as they could without thought of the future.

However, the most important consequence of the plague was the intensification of the labor crisis generated by the class conflict; for the decimation of the work-force made labor extremely scarce, critically increased its cost, and stiffened people’s determination to break the shackles of feudal rule.

As Christopher Dyer points out, the scarcity of labor which the epidemic caused shifted the power relation to the advantage of the lower classes. When land had been scarce, the peasants could be controlled by the threat of expulsion. But after the popu­lation was decimated and land became abundant, the threats of the lords ceased to have any serious effect, as the peasants could now freely move and find new land to cultivate (Dyer 1968: 26). Thus, while the crops were rotting and livestock wandered in the fields, peasants and artisans suddenly became masters of the situation. A symptom of this development was the growth of rent strikes, bolstered by threats of a mass exodus to other lands or to the city.As the manorial records laconically registered, the peasants "refused to pay” (negant solvere). They also declared that they “will not follow the customs any longer" (negant consuetudines), and ignored the orders of the lords to repair their houses, clena ditches, or chase escaped serfs (ibid.: 24).

By the end of the 14th century the refusal of rent and services had become a collectivee phenomenon. Entire villages jointly organized to stop paying fines, taxes and tallage, and no longer recognized the commuted services, or the injunctions of the manorial courts, which were the main instrument of feudal power. In this context, the quantity of rent and services withheld became less important than the fact that the class relation, on which the feudal order was based, was subverted. This is how an early 16th-century writer whose words reflect the viewpoint of the nobility, summed up the situation:

The peasants are too rich... and do not know what obedience means;
they don't take law into any account, they wish there
were no nobles... 
and they would like to decide what rent we should get for our lands  ibid.: 33).

In response to the increased cost of labor and the collapse of the feudal rent, various attempts were made to increase the exploitation of work, either through the restoration of labor services or, in some cases, the revival of slavery. In Florence, the importation of slaves was authorized in 1366. But such measures only sharpened the class conflict. In England, it was an attempt by the nobility to contain the cost of labor, by means of a Labor Statute limiting the maximum wage, that caused the Peasant Rising of 1381. This spread from region to region and ended with thousands of peasants marching from Kent to London “to talk to the king” (Hilton 1973; Dobson 1983). Also in France, between 1379 and 1382, there was a "whirlwind of revolution” (Boissonade 1927: 314). Proletarian insurrections exploded at Bezier, where forty weavers and cord-wainers were hanged. In Montpellier the workers in revolt proclaimed that "by Christinas we will sell Christian flesh at six pence a pound.” Revolts broke out in Carcassone, Orleans, Amiens, Tournai, Rouen and finally in Paris, where in 1413 a "workers' democracy" came into power. In Italy the most important revolt was that of the Ciompi. It began in July of 1382, when cloth-workers in Florence for a time forced the bourgeoisie to give them a share of government and declare a mora­torium on all debts incurred by wage earners; they then proclaimed what, in essence, was a dictatorship of the proletariat (“God's people”), though one soon crushed by die combined forces of the nobility and the bourgeoisie (Rodolico 1971).

"Now is the time” — the sentence that recurs in the letters of John Ball — well illustrates the spirit of the European proletariat at the close of the 14th century, a time when, in Florence, the wheel of fortune was beginning to appear on the walls of taverns and work-shops, to symbolize the imminent change of lot.

In the course of this process, the political horizon and the organizational dimensions of the peasant and artisan struggle broadened. Entire regions revolted, forming assemblies and recruiting armies. At times, the peasants organized in bands, attacking the castles of the lords, and destroying the archives where the written marks of their servi­tude were kept. By the 15th century the confrontation between the peasants and the nobility turned into true wars, like that of the remensas in Spain, that lasted from 1462 to 1486. In Germany a cycle of "peasant wars” began in 1476 with the conspiracy led by Hans the Piper. This escalated into four bloody rebellions led by Bundschuch ("Peasant Union”) between 1493 and 1517, and culminating in a full-fledged war that lasted from 1522 to 1525, spreading over four countries (Engels 1977; Blickle 1977).

In all these cases, the rebels did not content themselves with demanding some restrictions to feudal rule, nor did they only bargain for better living conditions.Their aim was to put an end to the power of the lords. As the English peasants declared dur­ing the Peasant Rising of 1381, “the old law must be abolished.” Indeed, by the begin­ning of the 15th century, in England at least, serfdom or villeinage had almost completely disappeared, though the revolt had been politically and militarily defeated and its lead­ers brutally executed (Titow 1969: 58).

What followed has been described as the "golden age of the European proletariat” (Marx 1909,Vol. l; Braudel 1967: 128ff.), a far cry from the canonic representation of the 15th century, which has been iconographically immortalized as a world under the spll of the dance of death and memento mori.

Thorold Rogers has painted a utopian image of this period in his famous study of wages and living conditions in medieval England. "At no time,” Rogers wrote, “were wages [in England] so high and food so cheap” (Rogers 1894: 32611). Workers sometimes were paid for every day of the year, although on Sunday and the main holidays they did not work. They were also fed by their employers, and were paid a viaticum for coming and going from home to work, at so much per mile of distance. In addition, they demanded to be paid in money, and wanted to work only five days a week.

As we shall see, there are reasons to be skeptical about the extent of this cornu­copia. However, for a broad section of the western European peasantry, and for urban workers, the 15th century was a period of unprecedented power. Not only did the scarcity of labor give them the upper hand, but the spectacle of employers competing for their services strengthened their sense of self-value, and erased centuries of degradation and subservience. The ‘scandal’ of the high wages the workers demanded was only matched, in the eyes of the employers, by the new arrogance they displayed — their refusal to work or to continue to work after having satisfied their needs (which they now could do more quickly because of their higher wages); their stubborn determination to hire themselves out only for limited tasks, rather than for prolonged penods of time; their demands for other perks beside their wages; and their ostentatious clothing which, according to the complaints of contemporary social critics, made them indistinguishable from the lords. "Servants are now masters and masters are servants,” complained John Gower in Mirour de l’omne (1378), “the peasant pretends to imitate the ways of the free­man, and gives himself the appearance of him in his clothes” (Hatcher 1994: 17).

The condition of the landless also improved after the Black Death (Hatcher 1994). This was not just an English phenomenon. In 1348 the canons of Normandy complained that they could not find anyone to cultivate their lands who did not ask for more than what six servants had earned at the beginning of the century. Wages doubled and trebled in Italy, France and Germany (Boissonnade 1927: 316-20). In the lands of the Rhine and Danube, the daily agricultural wage became equivalent in purchasing power to the price of a pig or sheep, and these wage rates applied to women as well, for the differential between female and male earnings was drastically reduced in the wake of the Black Death.

What this meant for the European proletariat was not only the achievement of a standard of living that remained unparalleled until the 19th century, but the demise of serfdom. By the end of the 14 th century land bondage had practically disappeared (Marx 1909,Vol. l: 788). Everywhere serfs were replaced by free farmers — copy holders or lease holders — who would accept work only for a substantial reward.


From “Notes on a Novel Coronavirus” by Rob Wallace. Monthly Review Online Jan 29, 2020
Structural causes of disease are themselves a source of debate. For one, questions remain as to 2019-nCoV’s origins.
Much initial attention has been placed on a particular exotic food market in Wuhan, with an orientalist preoccupation with strange and unsavory diets, representing both the end of biodiversity the West itself is destroying and a revolting source of dangerous disease:
The typical market in China has fruits and vegetables, butchered beef, pork and lamb, whole plucked chickens — with heads and beaks attached — and live crabs and fish, spewing water out of churning tanks. Some sell more unusual fare, including live snakes, turtles and cicadas, guinea pigs, bamboo rats, badgers, hedgehogs, otters, palm civets, even wolf cubs.
Said snakes are brandished as both signifier and signified, a literal source of 2019-nCoV that also harkens to a paradise lost and original sin from a serpent’s maw.
There is epidemiological evidence in favor of the hypothesis. Thirty-three of 585 samples at the Wuhan market were found positive for 2019-nCoV, with 31 at the west end of the market where wildlife trading was concentrated.
On the other hand, only 41% of these positive samples were found in market streets where the wildlife were housed. A quarter of the original infectees never visited the Wuhan market or appeared directly exposed. The earliest case was identified before the market was hit. Other infected marketers trafficked in hog alone, a livestock species that expresses a common vulnerable molecular receptor, leading one team to hypothesize hog as the putative source for the new coronavirus.
Atop African swine fever, which has killed as many as half of China’s hog this past year, the latter possibility would represent quite the clusterfuck. Such disease convergences are not unheard of, even folding into an intimate reciprocal activation, wherein proteins of each pathogen catalyze each other, facilitating new clinical courses and transmission dynamics for both diseases.
At the same time, Western Sinophobia doesn’t absolve Chinese public health. Certainly the anger and disappointment the Chinese public has directed at local and federal authorities for their slow reaction to 2019-nCoV can’t be spun as weaponized xenophobia. And in our wise efforts to keep our foot out of that trap, we may also be missing a critical agroecological symmetry.
Setting aside the culture war, wet markets and exotic food are staples in China, as is now industrial production, juxtaposed alongside each other since economic liberalization post-Mao. Indeed, the two food modes may be integrated by way of land use.
Expanding industrial production may push increasingly capitalized wild foods deeper into the last of the primary landscape, dredging out a wider variety of potentially protopandemic pathogens. Peri-urban loops of growing extent and population density may increase the interface (and spillover) between wild nonhuman populations and newly urbanized rurality.
Worldwide, even the wildest subsistence species are being roped into ag value chains: among them ostriches, porcupine, crocodiles, fruit bats, and the palm civet, whose partially digested berries now supply the world’s most expensive coffee bean. Some wild species are making it onto forks before they are even scientifically identified, including one new short-nosed dogfish found in a Taiwanese market.
All are increasingly treated as food commodities. As nature is stripped place-by-place, species-by-species, what’s left over becomes that much more valuable.
Weberian anthropologist Lyle Fearnley pointed out that farmers in China repeatedly manipulate the distinction between wildness and domesticity as an economic signifier, producing new meanings and values attached to their animals, including in response to the very epidemiological alerts issued around their trade. A Marxist might push back that these signifiers emerge out of a context that extends well beyond smallholder control and out onto global circuits of capital.
So while the distinction between factory farms and wet markets isn’t unimportant, we may miss their similarities (and dialectical relationships).
The distinctions bleed together by a number of other mechanisms. Many a smallholder worldwide, including in China, is in actuality a contractor, growing out day-old poultry, for instance, for industrial processing. So on a contractor’s smallholding along the forest edge, a food animal may catch a pathogen before being shipped back to a processing plant on the outer ring of a major city.
Spreading factory farms meanwhile may force increasingly corporatized wild foods companies to trawl deeper into the forest, increasing the likelihood of picking up a new pathogen, while reducing the kind of environmental complexity with which the forest disrupts transmission chains.
Capital weaponizes the resulting disease investigations. Blaming smallholders is now a standard agribusiness crisis management practice, but clearly diseases are a matter of systems of production over time and space and mode, not just specific actors between whom we can juggle blame.
As a class, the coronaviruses appear to straddle these distinctions. While SARS and 2019-nCoV appeared to have emerged out of wet markets—possible pigs aside—MERS, the other deadly coronavirus, emerged straight out of an industrializing camel sector in the Middle East. It’s a path to virulence largely left out of broader scientific discussion about these viruses.
It should change how we think about them. I would recommend we err on the side of viewing disease causality and intervention beyond the biomedical or even ecohealth object and out into the field of ecosocial relationships.
Other ethoses see a different way out. Some researchers recommend we genetically engineer poultry and livestock to be resistant to these diseases. They leave out whether that would still allow these strains to circulate among what would now be asymptomatic food animals before spilling over into decidedly unengineered humans.
Again turning back the clock, a source of my pique, nine years ago I wrote about what efforts at genetically engineering out pathogens miss as matters of first principle:
Beyond the issue of the affordability of the new frankenchicken, especially for the poorest countries, influenza’s success arises in part from its capacity to outwit and outlast such silver bullets. Hypotheses tied to a lucrative model of biology are routinely mistaken for expectations about material reality, expectations are mistaken for projections, and projections for predictions.
One source of vexation is the dimensionality of the problem. There is even among mainstream scholars a dawning realization influenza is more than mere virion or infection; that it respects little of disciplinary boundaries (and business plans) in both their form and content. Pathogens regularly use processes accumulating at one level of biocultural organization to solve problems they face at other levels, including the molecular.
Agribusiness ever turns us toward a techno-utopian future to keep us in a past bounded by capitalist relations. We are spun round and round the very commodity tracks selecting for new diseases in the first place.
 

From “A Sudden Topicality: Marx, Nietzsche and the politics of crisis” by Peter Osborne. Radical Philosophy 160 (Mar/Apr 2010)

Karl Marx was a thinker of crisis. But in what sense was he a theorist of crisis? In what sense did he propound something that might legitimately be called a ‘crisis theory’?* 
The question may seem an odd one. After all, although there is no one text by Marx specifically dedicated to the topic, it is generally held to be pervasive throughout his economic and political writings from the late 1840s onwards; indeed, to constitute their very rationale – the energizing demonstration of the necessity of social change, via the demonstration of the tendency to crisis inherent in the capitalist mode of production itself. Marxists have long debated the meaning and significance of the ‘crisis theory’ contained in Marx’s passages on this topic – in particular, the question of whether or not it constitutes a theory of breakdown or collapse (Zusammenbruch). This question was at the heart of the revisionist controversies around the time of the First War World, for example, in which both Rosa Luxemburg (The Accumulation of Capital, 1913) and, later, Henryk Grossman (The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, 1929) upheld the theory of breakdown against what were held to be ‘revisionist’ positions. 
The revival of Marxist theory in Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s brought a corresponding revival of interest in crisis theory. Numerous new books and articles were published on the topic, with titles like (from the anglophone literature) ‘The Marxian Theory of Crises, Capital and the State’ (David Yaffe, 1972), Capitalism and Crisis (Walton and Gamble, 1976), United States Capitalism in Crisis (Union of Radical Political Economists, 1978) and Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory (Paul Mattick, 1981), leading up to Simon Clarke’s synthetic Marx’s Theory of Crisis (1993).1 In the last two years the genre has been revived once again. In the UK, the 2007 Isaac and 
Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize (the only significant English-language book prize for a work of historical materialism) went to Rick Kuhn’s Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism. The most recent book by the 2004 winner of the prize, Michael Lebowitz, returns to his work on crisis theory from over twenty years ago. And the journal at the centre of the revival of Marxist Studies in the anglophone academy, Historical Materialism (founded in 1992), has carried various articles and a symposium theorizing the current global financial crisis in terms of Marx’s theory of crisis.2  To each crisis, we might say, its own revival of Marx’s ‘theory of crisis’. 
This alone should give us pause for thought. (I still recall the manner in which, at the Socialist Movement conference in Chesterfield in the north of England on Monday 19 October 1987, the day of what is still the largest one-day stock market crash in history – the Dow dropped over 22 per cent, in a crash unconnected to a general crisis – by the early afternoon, the Trotskyist economists associated with the then recently abolished Greater London Council publicly announced the arrival of the long-awaited collapse of the capitalist system.) Just as Marx saw periodic crises as ‘bringing to the surface’ the underlying ‘barrier’ (Schranke) to the development of the productive forces inherent within the capitalist mode of production,3 so economic crises also bring to the surface a desire to displace the politics of social transformation onto economic events. In this respect, one might say: periodic eco- nomic crises are windows onto the permanent crisis of Marxist political thought. 
In counter-position to this recurring dependence of a politics of fundamental social transformation upon periodic economic crises, Antonio Negri has argued that the problem with the Marxian analytic of subsumed labour is that it ‘exclude[s] social labour-power as the potentiality for crisis’, neglecting ‘the antagonism that the plural substantial times of subjects oppose to the analytic of command’.4 Negri thereby posits the possibility of a purely political kind of capitalist crisis. Yet such a purely political antagonism has shown no signs of generating a crisis for the capitalist order. (The ontologization of politics appears here as a symptom of the crisis of political thought, rather than its solution.) Negri’s accompanying declaration that, ‘synonymous with real subsumption’, crisis is now ‘simultaneous and stable’, indeed ‘consubstantial with the current phase of capitalist development’, redefines out of existence the politically crucial aspect of the traditional idea of crisis: namely, the conception of crisis as a decisive turning point in a process, a point at which a decision must be made. (But by whom or what?) Marx himself famously insisted, against Adam Smith: ‘Permanent crises do not exist.’5 It is the tendency towards and potentiality for crisis that is permanent, not the crisis itself. 
Crises of accumulation, crisis of capitalism? 
The doubt as to whether Marx should be thought of a crisis theorist – as opposed to a ‘thinker’ of crisis in some more general, yet-to-be-determined sense – stems from the disjunction between the all- pervasive, general-historical character of the concept of crisis in its modern form (including the historico-political notion of a crisis of the capitalist system as a whole, as a condition of a transition to a new mode of production – a notion which clearly motivated Marx), on the one hand, and the restrictedly conjunctural character and relatively narrow political-economic basis of Marx’s so-called ‘theory of crisis’, as a theory of periodic crises or cycles within capitalism, on the other. For Marx, economic crises within capital- ism are normal stages in the conjunctural cycle or spiral of expanded reproduction. Textually, what is thought of as the theory of such crises is primarily to be found in Part 3 of Volume 3 of Capital – put together by Engels from Marx’s notes and published in 1894 as ‘The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall’ (especially chapter 15, ‘Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law’) – along with some passages in the Grundrisse (in ‘The Chapter on Capital’) and Theories of Surplus Value (especially chapter 17), which describe ‘overproduction’ as ‘the fundamental contradiction of developed capital’ and ‘the basic phenomenon in crises’, respectively.6 In so far as there is a general theory of capitalist crisis here, it is threefold. 
1. Crises are modes of appearance of structural contradictions within the process of capitalist production – they bring contradictions ‘to the surface’, as Marx says. 
2. Crises are means for the temporary solution, and hence new forms of mediation, of such contradictions, which restore the conditions for accumulation. 
3. The restoration of conditions for accumulation is at the same time the renewal of the terms of the contradictions within the system that gave rise to the crisis in the first place. 
Hence the ‘periodic’ or ‘cyclical’ character of such crises, taking the developmental form of a spiral. As Marx put it in Capital: 
From time to time [periodisch] the conflict of antagonistic agencies finds vent in crises. The crises are always but momentary and forcible solutions of the existing contradictions. They are violent eruptions that for a time [den Augenblick] restore the disturbed equilibrium.7 
The mechanism of the capitalist production process itself removes the very obstacles it temporarily creates.8 
Capitalist production seeks continually to overcome these immanent barriers, but overcomes them only by means which again place these barriers in its way and on a more formidable scale.9  
Debate has focused on whether crisis tendencies can always, in principle, be countered by what Marx  called ‘counteracting tendencies’ (widerstrebende Ten denzen) 10 and, we must add, crucially, their political management (the Keynesian moment – a crucial aspect of the process that is no longer part of ‘the capitalist production process itself’) or whether the barriers to the development of productive forces that are involved represent some kind of cumulative ultimate limit to capital accumulation, since, in Marx’s famous words in Chapter 15 of Capital, Volume 3: ‘The true barrier [Die wahre Schranke] to capitalist production is capital itself.’11 As David Harvey has recently pointed out: ‘How to understand crisis formation remains ... by far the most contentious issue in Marxian political economy.’12 
There are a number of theoretical difficulties here. First, Marx’s recurring discussions of the ‘immanent barriers’ to capital accumulation determine limits purely formally, in comparison with hypothetically ‘unfettered’ production at the same level of development of the productive forces. There is no sense that a subsequent mode of production might impose its own, different kind of limits to production. ‘Limit’ here is thus the negative or reverse side of a productivist utopianism (to be distinguished from its use by Marx in the sense of those ‘limits of variation’ that define the field of operation of his concept of law).13 Second, although Marx often uses the terms synonymously,14 a ‘barrier’ (Schranke) is not quite the same thing as a ‘limit’ (Grenze), in that a barrier (unlike a certain conception of limit) can always in principle be overcome. Furthermore, the existence of certain inherent limits (relative to formal possibility) is not in itself a barrier to infinite expansion. There is no contradiction in the idea of an infinite expansion within limits. Taken in the context of the multiplicity of tendencies counteracting breakdown or collapse, there are thus scant purely theoretical grounds for believing in its necessity. As Marx put it: ‘[The] process would soon entail the breakdown of capitalist production, if counteracting tendencies were not constantly at work.’15 
However, whatever position one takes in this debate, the literature on Marx on crisis, from Maksakovsky’s 1928 The Capitalist Cycle to Lebowitz’s 2008 Following Marx,16 is agreed on one thing: in so far as Marx has a ‘theory’ of crisis, it is a critical political- economic theory of crises in capitalist production. In so far as ‘crisis’ has a political meaning for Marx, though, it is in its relation to the broader historical process of a transition to a new, non-capitalist mode of production (‘social revolution’). In this respect, ‘crisis theory’ is necessarily inadequate to the thinking of crisis required, even if one were to believe that it establishes the inevitability of ‘breakdown’ (which I do not; which is not to say that such a breakdown might not come about – in which case, socialism remains far less likely an outcome than barbarism). Analysis of the historical process demands not merely an account of fundamental contradictions and their expression in conflicts and crises, but an account of crisis as a condition of possibility of the new, in this case the qualitatively historically new: new forms of social production, new relations of production and forms of organization. Crisis ‘theory’ is thus in principle inadequate to thinking the historico-political meaning of crises – and this includes Marx’s own account (or ‘theory’) of capitalist crises, however central to such a thinking it might be. 
Hence my reluctance to think of Marx as a crisis ‘theorist’, with respect to the politics of crises, which was his ultimate concern. 
It is a failure to adhere to the dis- junction between forms of analysis here (historical development of the mode of production beyond its own limits, on the one hand, and political economy of capital, on the other) that generates the quasi-theological notion of a ‘final’ crisis of the capitalist system, as a whole, as some kind of event, rather than a process with a duration of many decades, if not centuries, appropriate to the idea of a ‘social’ rather than a merely ‘political’ revolution. And it is this notion that lies behind the 
substitution of a theory of breakdown for a (generational) politics of transformation. Nonetheless, the political significance of the concept of crisis motivating Marxist debates depends upon some projected articulation of these two levels, some conjunctural political effectivity at the level of the mode of production, in response to ‘periodic’ crisis. It is the assumption of such an articulation that has led, historically, to charges of ‘economism’ and ‘determinism’ being laid against Marx’s work, despite the fact that the projected mechanism of articulation is, precisely, not economic but political – namely ‘struggles’ directed towards the reappropriation of the collective powers of social labour. This is a ‘mechanism’, if one may continue to call it that – a mechanism for the transformation of conjunctural crisis into structural change – which falls outside the ‘theory’ of crisis as such. Rather, as Balibar argued back in the 1960s: ‘The analysis of the transformation of the limits ... requires [minimally, we might add – PO] a theory of the different times of the economic structure and of the class struggle, and of their articulation in the social structure.’17 
It is the current near-total absence of the social conditions for such a politics of reappropriation, of course, that has reduced the politics of crisis to that of the state’s management of the interests of ‘capital in general’, in antagonism with those of particular capitals (currently, mainly banking capital) – making crisis almost exclusively an intra-capitalist affair. Hence the current debates regarding the extent to which certain financial instruments, such as credit derivatives, threaten the ongoing expanded reproduction of the system, in a structural manner, and the extent to which what we are seeing is simply another periodic crisis in the spiral of expanded reproduction, in which capital has run up against a barrier of its own making, and thereby set itself the task of overcoming it, as the condition of a new cycle of accumulation. There is no reason, in principle, to believe that it cannot achieve this task, with the coordinated help of the major capitalist states; albeit at considerable cost to the lives of working populations. 
At the outset, then, we can discern basic temporal distinctions between the way the concept of crisis functions at three levels: (1) the longue durée of history (transition between modes of production), (2) the theory of crisis as part of the political economy of capitalism (the theory of ‘the cycle’), and (3) actual, concrete conjunctures, such as the current ‘global financial crisis’, as it is called. In fact, this crisis is arguably more of a crisis of the money-form of capital (of the radical diversification and speculative intensification of forms of ‘money’) set off, in part, by the unforeseen consequences of various technical alternatives to the perceived unreliability of the US dollar as a store of value.18 Any account of crisis adequate to Marx’s political desire – which was constituted at the level of history – would involve, minimally, the articulation of these three temporalities.19 
However, maintaining these distinctions between levels and hence objects of analysis, and further investigating the concept of crisis in its fundamental political meaning at the level of its greatest historical generality, was not the way the literature on ‘crisis theory’ responded to the supposed economism of the traditional Marxist version. Rather, especially since the 1970s, the response has been what one might call a Weberian methodological turn in crisis theory toward a pluralization of types of crisis, not just within political economy (most notably, James O’Connor’s 1973 The Fiscal Crisis of the State20), but societally. Jürgen Habermas’s Legitimation Crisis (also 1973) was an important text in this regard, with its multiple classifications of types of crisis, setting out from the distinction between system and lifeworld, and moving on to distinguish economic crisis, rationality crisis, legitimation crisis and motivation crisis.21 In his 1987 survey, The Meaning of Crisis (a book that singularly fails to discuss, precisely, the question of meaning), O’Connor synthesizes such approaches via further generic distinctions between economic crisis, social crisis, political crisis and personality crisis.22 This kind of typologizing particularization takes the meaning of crisis for granted and simply seeks instances of it, empirically, in a largely descriptive manner. 
But what of the generality and fundamentally historical character of the concept of crisis? At this point, it is useful to take a brief digression via Koselleck’s historical semantics, in order to remind ourselves of the kind of concept that crisis is. I shall draw on three texts here: Koselleck’s 1959 Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, his 1982 entry for ‘Crisis’ in the 8-volume Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe/Basic Concepts in History, and the more recent essay ‘Some Questions Regarding the Conceptual History of “Crisis”’, into which the results of the latter are condensed.23 


Excerpt from the Introduction to The Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldun (1377).
(On historiography and the role of the Plague.)
History refers to events that are peculiar to a particular age or race. Discussion of the general conditions of regions, races, and periods constitutes the historian's foundation. Most of his problems rest upon that foundation, and his historical information derives clarity from it. It forms the topic of special works, such as the Muruj adh-dhahab of al-Mas'udi. In this work, al-Mas'udi commented upon the conditions of nations and regions in the West and in the East during his period (which was) the three hundred and thirties [the nine hundred and forties]. He mentioned their sects and customs. He described the various countries, mountains, oceans, provinces, and dynasties. He distinguished between Arabic and non-Arabic groups. His book, thus, became the basic reference work for historians, their principal source for verifying historical information.
Al-Mas'udi was succeeded by al-Bakri who did something similar for routes and provinces, to the exclusion of everything else, because, in his time, not many transformations or great changes had occurred among the nations and races. However, at the present time-that is, at the end of the eighth [fourteenth] century-the situation in the Maghrib, as we can observe, has taken a turn and changed entirely. The Berbers, the original population of the Maghrib, have been replaced by an influx of Arabs, (that began in) the fifth [eleventh] century. The Arabs outnumbered and overpowered the Berbers, stripped them of most of their lands, and (also) obtained a share of those that remained in their possession. This was the situation until, in the middle of the eighth [fourteenth] century, civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed. The East, it seems, was similarly visited, though in accordance with and in proportion to (the East's more affluent) civilization. It was as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion and restriction, and the world had responded to its call. God inherits the earth and whomever is upon it.
When there is a general change of conditions, it is as if the entire creation had changed and the whole world been altered, as if it were a new and repeated creation, a world brought into existence anew. Therefore, there is need at this time that someone should systematically set down the situation of the world among all regions and races, as well as the customs and sectarian beliefs that have changed for their adherents, doing for this age what al-Mas'udi did for his. This should be a model for future historians to follow.

From “Reading Ibn Khaldun in Kampala” by Mahmood Mamdani
No sooner had we started the program than we were confronted by another challenge: the need to develop a curriculum appropriate to our time and our place. The curriculum at the university was not only strongly present‐oriented but was also driven by the language of “crisis” and “transitions,” preoccupied with issues ranging from “development” and “conflict resolution” to “HIV/AIDS” and “identity politics.” It seldom probed beyond the contemporary and, when it did, the tendency was to limit the perspective to the colonial period. How do we reshape this curriculum to make possible a radically historical and humanist inquiry of “Africa” and “African” without dislocating it from the world at large?
Though we started with this ambition, it was not easy to translate it into practice. To ask Marx's question: who will educate the educator? Inevitably, we began by borrowing the curriculum from wherever each of us had just taught or studied – inevitably in the Western academy. We agreed that our graduates had to be equipped to work in the world as exists. So students in the MISR doctoral program took two courses in theory, Western Political Thought, Plato to Marx in their first year and Contemporary Western Political Thought in their second year. At the same time, we wanted students to become familiar with other traditions. The Muqaddimah was read in a course titled Major Debates in the Study of Africa. Alongside Ibn Khaldun, students read W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa, Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origins of Civilization, Martin Bernal, Black Athena, Samir Amin, Eurocentrism. Marshall Hodgson, Rethinking World History and Edward Said, Orientalism. The course covered seven debates: Historiography; Different kinds of slave trade; State Formation; Colonialism; Underdevelopment; Nationalism and the anti‐colonial struggle; and State and Society in the post‐colony.
We continued to grapple with one question as we went along: how do we decolonize the curriculum? It is in this context that we began reading The Muqaddimah, first in a study group in 2011 and then in a doctoral seminar in 2012.
…
What is history? At the most elementary level, notes Ibn Khaldun: “History refers to events that are peculiar to a particular age or race. Discussion[s] of the general conditions of regions, races, and periods constitutes the historian's foundation. [on the translation of the Arabic original as ‘race’, see later ‐ MM]” This is why “mere blind imitation of former authors” will not work. Those who resort to it “disregard the intentions of the former authors and forget to pay attention to historiography's purpose.”
To begin with, historical narrative requires periodization. Change is normal and a historian who ignores this is sure to be lead astray: “A hidden pitfall in historiography is disregard for the fact that conditions within nations and races change with the change of periods and the passage of time.” For an exemplary history that takes into account changes in general conditions, Ibn Khaldun pointed to al‐Masudi's account of the plague in the 14th century. As demonstrated by Persian history, change at its most basic level affects institutions and customs: “The old institutions changed and former customs were transformed, … Then, there came Islam. Again, all institutions underwent another change.”
If the most basic change concerns a change in institutions and customs, then periodization should be based on an identification of institutional change, so that events may be narrated within each period. Here, the historian needs to beware of two dangers. The first is exaggeration. The second stems from a failure to verify the reliability of sources, both oral and written. Ibn Khaldun's focus was mainly on oral tradition. How does the historian go beyond checking the factual truth of the information transmitted to judging its historical credibility? “Historians, Qur'an commentators and leading transmitters have committed frequent errors in the stories and events they have reported. They accepted them in the plain transmitted form, without regard for its value. They did not check them with the principles underlying such historical situations, nor did they compare them with similar material. Also, they did not probe with the yardstick of philosophy, with the help of knowledge of the nature of things, or with the help of speculation and historical insight.”