Economic, financial and social commentators from all directions and persuasion are obsessed with the prospect of recovery [ התאוששות כלכלית]. The world remains mired in a deep, prolonged crisis, and the key question seems to be how to get out of it.

Our basic argument in these papers is that this is a systemic crisis and that capitalists have been struck by systemic fear: fear for the very survival of the system.

This fear, we have further argued, is objectively grounded. Our reasons, though, are very different from those given by heterodox political economists, particularly Marxists. Whereas for the Marxists, the crisis is the symptom and culmination of weakening accumulation, for us it is the consequence of its unprecedented strength.

According to our research, the accumulation of capital-read-power might be approaching its asymptotes, or limits (Bichler and Nitzan 2012a). The closer capitalized power is to its asymptotes, the more difficult it is to augment it further. Capitalists, though, have no choice. They are conditioned and compelled to increase their capitalized power without end, and that relentless drive breeds conflict. It forces capitalists to increase their threats, escalate their sabotage and intensify their use of force – and this intensification is in turn bound to trigger stronger resistance, contestations, uprisings and more.

By the early 2000s, capitalists began to realize the unfolding of this asymptotic scenario. They started to sense that their power is nearing its limits and that accumulation is becoming ever more difficult to achieve and might be reversed. And given that capitalization is forward-looking, the result has been a major bear market.

From Part 6:

The driving force of capitalism is not economic growth and the accumulation of productive machines and structures, but the differential accumulation of capitalized power.

Now, understood as a power process, differential accumulation requires strategic sabotage, and this sabotage can take different forms. We have explored many of these forms in our previous works, and there are now young researchers who are extending this inquiry into new fields and regions. [6] But as the charts vividly illustrate, of these many processes of sabotage, the threat and exercise of unemployment remains central and crucial – not only temporarily as Marx suggested, but permanently.

This claim has significant implications for economic policy. As it turns out, the problem of policymakers is not only that their dogma has collapsed and that their ammunition has run out, but also, and more importantly, that their very policy goal is self-contradictory.

Capitalist policy is geared, first and foremost, toward accumulation. If accumulation recovers, argue both Marxists and liberals, economic growth will recover in tandem, and the tide of growth will then help lift up all boats – including those of workers – by lowering unemployment and raising the real wage.

However, if we think of capital as power, there is no way for policymakers to achieve both goals simultaneously, and for a simple reason: capitalists cannot afford recovery. In order for policymakers to boost the capitalist share of income, they need not to lower unemployment, but to raise it.

what lies ahead?

With these thoughts in mind, the final question to ask is what lies ahead? If the relationship depicted in Figure 15 continues to hold, the share of capitalists in U.S. domestic income is set to rise further in the coming years.

The crisis has raised unemployment to its highest level since the 1930s, and this increase in strategic sabotage should boost the power of capital and therefore its distributive share of income.

But capitalists are never content with the status quo. Their regime compels them to augment their capitalized power further and further, and that means more strategic sabotage and therefore even greater unemployment. And it is this need for ever greater sabotage – and the risk of backlash that record levels of sabotage may trigger – that fuels the systemic fear of both capitalists and their policymakers.