CRISIS THEORYANDTHE GREAT
RECESSION:APERSONALJOURNEY,
FROMMARXTO MINSKY$
Riccardo Bellofiore
ABSTRACT
There are two influential interpretative positions in the current debate on
the crisis among Marxists. The first understands financialization as a
consequence of the tendential fall of the rate of profit. The other
interpretation, prevalent among those influenced by Keynesianism and
Neoricardianism, refers to the tendency toward the crisis of realisation,
because of the squeeze on the wage bill and the insufficiency of consumer
demand. In both cases, the current crisis is the crisis of a feeble
$What follows is an idiosyncratic journey through Marx’s theory of crisis, of which I propose a
reconstruction and a development after – better, during – today’s new ‘‘great crisis.’’ In a sense,
it reviews and brings up to date much of what I learnt from mentors like Claudio Napoleoni,
Augusto Graziani, and Hyman Minsky – true masters whom I was lucky enough to meet.
Needless to say, they would probably disagree with some of the twists I give to my arguments.
My perspective clearly has a historical dimension, even a personal one, relating to my living in
the Turin of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Italian ‘‘hot autumn.’’ This is the reason why I
found that the usual format of literature references (author-date) does not work, and in the
manuscript I opted for a bibliographical note. The referees as well as editors of the journal
urged me to offer a more traditional way of references to the literature, but the reader is alerted
of the limitations of this way of proceeding in this case.