Starting with an inquiry into the socio-material foundations of American-style consumer capitalism as it emerged under Fordism and evolved under neoliberalism, this article seeks to outline the origins of the present economic crisis and the possible implications for the future of consumerism. The article argues that the ongoing crisis in the USA is not a regular cyclical downturn but signifies the end of finance-driven consumer capitalism as an accumulation regime whose key features can be summed up as debt-financed mass consumption of largely offshore produced goods and 'wealth creation' through rapidly appreciating asset values. The crisis qualifies as systemic in that various disproportionalities of the capitalist mode of production have resurfaced at the same time. While debt-driven consumer capitalism seems damaged to the extent of being no longer operable, the contours of a 'post-consumerist' future are not yet in sight.
This paper challenges prevailing accounts of the financial origins of the Great Recession by engaging two distinct theoretical perspectives originating in Karl Marx and Hyman Minsky. The paper argues that the domestic and global, financial and "real" origins of the crisis are deeply intertwined as the financialization of the U.S. economy and the globalization of production are inextricably linked. Thus, the merits of a Marxian interpretation of the crisis surpass those of the Minskyan for at least two reasons. First, the structural causes of the Great Recession lie not in the U.S. financial sector but in the system of globalized production which reflects the growing unevenness of capital accumulation on a planetary scale, manifested in the global imbalances. Second, the belief that social problems have monetary or financial origins, and could be resolved by tinkering with money and financial institutions, is fundamentally flawed, for the very recurrence of crises attests to the limits of fiscal and monetary policies as means to ensure "balanced" accumulation.JEL Codes: E40, E50, E60, F30, F40, F50
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