Disproportionality theory of crises

I have recently been writing up something on various theories of capitalist crises and happened to re-read Simon Clarke's magnificent essay, "The Marxist Theory of Overaccumulation and Crisis"(http://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/pubs/sands.pdf).

As I understand it, Clarke supports disproportionality  theory – the idea that crises originate out of disproportional growth between different lines of  production which generates overshoot situations and then knock-on effects that can then lead to a generalised recession.  This is as opposed to underconsumptionist theories that claim crises are the result of systemic deficiences in market demand or theories that focus on the falling rate of profit. 

What is interesting about Clarke's peice is that he sharply differentiates between bourgeois theories of disproportional growth and the Marxian theory.  He seems to be suggesting that Left wing critics of disproportionality theory have failed to notice the difference.  Thus

Disproportionality theories of crisis have tended to be rejected by revolutionary socialists, primarily on the grounds of their very close reformist associations. The source of disproportionality theory was Tugan-Baranowsky's 1893 criticism of underconsumptionism on the basis of Marx's reproduction schemes, which supposedly showed that disproportionalities were the only possible source of crises, and that such crises were not necessary but contingent, arising from the ignorance of capitalists as to the future development of the market, and intensified by the expansion of credit which sustained the disproportional expansion of production. This argument was seized on by the reformist wing of Social Democracy as an argument in favour of reforms which would overcome the `anarchy of the market' through the centralised coordination of capitalist production

The argument is that such "bourgeois" interpretations tend to ground the source of  disproportinalities in subjective factors or institutional shortcomings such as the excessively easy availability of cheap credit which induces capitalists to make irrational investment decisions.  The implication of all this  is that the origin of crises lie not with the very nature of a market economy itself but historically contingent factors that impede the effective running of such an economy.  So we have Marshallian type explanations which attribute a crisis to some irrational "collective  wave of optimism" in which the capitalists are caught up. Or the Schumpeterian explananation  that it  is "induced  by the opportunities for surplus profit presented by technological innovation " . Or the Hayekian explanation that it is all down to  the reckless and irresponsible expansion of easy credit  What  runs through all these arguments is the basic idea that it is by changing the perception of individuals or by tightening up on the availability of credit and generally conducting affairs in a more conscientious and responsible manner  that crisis can be averted. Crises are not the product of capitalism but of the human agents inside capitalism (it is for much the same reason that workers are blamed for their own poverty)

Left wing critics of disproportionality theory, wanting  to ground their own theories of capitist crises in objective, rather than subjective,  factors have naturally tended to reject versions of this theory that  give credence to the later.  But Clarke too rejects such versions just as he rejects underconsumptionist and falling  rate of profit explanations 

As he puts it, the  "disproportionalities, which Tugan- Baranowski correctly identified as the source of general crises, are not merely the contingent result of the `anarchy of the market', but are the necessary result of the social form of capitalist production, the expression of the tendency to the overproduction of commodities" (ibid).  The accumulation process is inevitably subject to uneven development which is the outcome of objective factors and express itself in the form of disproportional growth. So for example, technical, social. labour supply or natural barriers may – and,  indeed, inevitably will – affect different lines of  production differentially, holding back growth in one branch of industry  vis a vis others and so resulting in an overshoot situation from the standpoint of other branches, particularly those closely associated with the former.  Overshoot then initiates a "knock on" process  that can spiral into a generalised recession. Or to put it differently , "the specific form of disproportionality is not determined primarily by the disproportional growth of demand for particular commodities, but by the disproportional growth of supply, determined by the uneven development of the forces of production" (ibid).

I think Clarke's essay is a very useful addition to the arsenal of revolutionary socialist theory