Debating Crisis

Why is crisis a core feature of capitalism? What role does crisis play in the history of capitalism? How useful is crisis as a concept for understanding contemporary political-economic upheavals, for both scholars and activists? Are we in the midst of a crisis or new era of polycrisis or permacrisis? How can we understand our location within it?

Chris Saltmarsh is a postgraduate researcher at University of Sheffield. Dillon Wamsley is a postdoctoral researcher the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI). They are producers and co-hosts of Crisis Point, a SPERI Presents... limited series introducing the political economy of capitalist crises, providing historical and theoretical rigour to discourses around crisis in the present.

In this first episode, they discuss how the concept of crisis is variously understood in political economy literatures, begin to develop a working theory of crisis, and introduce key questions that will be applied to historic and contemporary crisis events throughout the series.

Recommended reading for this episode:

1) Andrew Gamble, Crisis Without End? The Unravelling of Western Prosperity (2014), Chapter 2, pp. 28-47.
2) Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey, Interpreting the Crisis, Soundings (2010)
3) Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, Capitalist Crises and the Crisis this Time, Socialist Register (2011)
4) Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks (1971), pp. 399-401

Works referenced in this episode:
1) Adam Tooze, Defining polycrisis – From crisis pictures to the crisis matrix (2022)
2) Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (2010)