Creative destruction, not peace, causes capitalism’s endemic crises

Evidence

“Creative destruction” has become, in fact, an important phrase for the financial sector and the advocates of its further deregulation. The idea emerges in its fullest form from Joseph Schumpeter’s reading of Marx, the latter having drawn on Adam Smith to observe the ways in which capitalism is constantly revolutionizing itself. Yet this leads to massive waste when old machinery and whole populations are idled and reduced to worthlessness as capitalists compete to lower the costs of production. Importantly, for Marx, this “creative destruction” is the cause of the endemic crisis both of the falling rate of profit (capitalists strive so hard to lower production costs that they drive themselves out of business and drive workers into potentially revolutionary poverty) and of the financial system (Harvey 2006, 176–197; Perelman 1987). — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 428

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the reader’s Marx-adjacent background and to deWaard’s project of reading finance as cultural force, plus the learned example on capitalism ending in barbarism. — connects to: Capitalism’s progress depends on business failure, not despite it. — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 323; Sustained capitalist mutation requires new institutional forms, not merely destruction — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 156; Economic crises are also conceptual and intellectual catastrophes — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 45 (+8 more)
• DEFINE: Usefully clarifies the real pedigree of ‘creative destruction’ — Schumpeter reading Marx reading Smith — against its today banalized deregulatory usage.

Broader Connections

• Sustained capitalist mutation requires new institutional forms, not merely destruction #complicates (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 156
• Capitalism’s resilience comes from its plasticity in adopting new social forms #contradicts (0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1647
• Neoliberal modernisation aimed to destroy non-market sources of social reproduction #complicates (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 354
• Capitalism operates as opportunistic parasitism, not optimal allocation #expands (0.74) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 180
• Economic crises are also conceptual and intellectual catastrophes #expands (0.72) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 45
• The internet shattered capitalism’s evolutionary fitness rather than defeating or entrenching it #exemplifies (0.72) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 232