Contemporary Capitalism and Its Crises: Social Structure of Accumulation Theory for the 21st Century

摘要

A Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) is a set of institutions that conditions capital accumulation. An SSA continually changes and eventually passes into another SSA in an unending process driven by class conflict. The process is conditioned by other kinds of conflict and by other factors. Nonetheless, the internal contradictions an SSA contains tend to rise to a crisis until accumulation either is stopped or drastically slowed down. The crisis may result in a collapse of capitalism itself or the emergence of a new set of institutions that restart the accumulation process. SSA theory explains the social provisioning process in terms of the process itself, not in terms of exogenous events, autonomous forces, or external interferences. In that respect, it is evolutionary theory.