Abstract

This contribution incorporates core lessons of capitalist crisis formation as explained in Volume III of Capital, but also recognises gaps in how crisis tendencies are explained—gaps filled by Rosa Luxemburg’s insistence on the articulation between capitalist and non-capitalist relations, and by David Harvey’s addition of space, time and ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Applied to South Africa, these concepts help to clarify the longer-term character of capitalist crisis and social resistance. The need to transcend the capitalist mode of production in the world’s most economically unequal and racially stratified society—with its manifold gender- and ecologically-exploitative power relations, tied to extreme uneven and combined development—is obvious. The repeated capitalist crises facing South Africa and the world constitute—as Marx, Luxemburg and Harvey demonstrate—the final nail in the coffin.