The Limits to Capital in Spain: The Roots of the 'New Normal'

This article contributes to a Marxist understanding of the roots of the contemporary predicament for many societies in which future economic growth is likely to be low and accompanied by mass ‘structural’ unemployment, increased inequality and further crises of social and political cohesion. It takes Spain as an exemplar of this ‘new normal’, and argues that the ‘irrational rationality’ of crisis in capitalism can be seen in successive cycles of crises that have resulted in the present catastrophe in that country, and also—by means of European economic and monetary union—in the delimiting of political opportunities to restore growth on any other basis than through the subordination of social reproduction to the power of money and (increasingly authoritarian) law. The article therefore supports value-theoretical, diachronic analyses of capitalist development that trace the prefiguration of contemporary forms of crisis in the formation and ‘resolution’ of preceding cycles of overaccumluation and devaluation.