Crises, Profit, and Exploitation: A Structural-Marxist Interpretation of the 2007-08 Global Financial Crisis

Abstract

This thesis explores the relationship between capitalism and exploitation in wake of the 2007-08 global financial crisis and subsequent economic recessions among the world’s most advanced capitalist nations. Starting from the position that not enough theoretical work has been done, particularly within criminology, to analyze the harms caused by crises in capitalism, I argue that a structural-Marxist framework can help fill this gap in the literature. By building a theoretical model based on Karl Marx’s original work on crises in capitalism, the structuralism of Louis Althusser, and as the philosophical materialism of David Harvey, I examine the ways in which the global financial crisis is not the unexpected event mainstream narratives maintain, but rather one that has been over a century in the making. On an empirical level, drawing insight from the Greek financial crisis, the model proposed is deployed to analyze the role that international financial institutions have had in the recent crisis and draw a link between these patterns and the status of modern capitalism, suggesting that the economic trauma we face now is intimately linked to the predisposition of capital (re)production and accumulation. This thesis ultimately underlines the fact that while we are governed by this ‘new’, more aggressive capitalism, it is also ‘the same’ in that Marx’s insights regarding the contradictions of capital accumulation are equally applicable today as they were in his time.