Pressing beyond the limits: Crisis theory between Simon Clarke and Robert Brenner

This article stages an encounter of crisis theories between Robert Brenner, an influential figure of Political Marxism, and Simon Clarke, an understudied figure of Open Marxism. Its central conceit is that what we call “Marxist crisis theory” is a collective endeavor to extend and refine Marx’s own unfinished work on crisis and that, despite Clarke’s fierce criticisms of Brenner’s controversial long downturn framework, the two theorists share a number of overlooked and surprising affinities. By tracing their shared theoretical opponents, I show that Brenner and Clarke share an antipathy for the profit squeeze and falling rate of profit accounts of crisis. Most significantly, I show that Clarke’s theoretical elaboration of capital’s underlying tendency to overproduction sets capital’s drive for self-expanding profitability against the concrete demands of realization and the “limits of the market,” arguing that these core principles of Clarke’s crisis theory are also the methodological pillars of Brenner’s long downturn framework. Finally, I suggest that Brenner and Clarke’s parallel contributions argue for the inextricability of capitalist crisis with the historical role of the capitalist state as a social form, where the historical development of the capitalist state apparatus is contingent upon the tumult of working-class self-organization and revolt yet ossifies into legal and monetary institutional forms opposed to the interests of the class conflicts that birthed them. Within these constraints, class struggle cannot help but press beyond the historical limits dictated by crisis and by the social form of the state.