What do we use for that anyway, DeepSeek? Though unfortunately, it’s censored for some reason, just mentioniong Mao or The Cultural Revolution makes it censor itself.
Marx and Engels argued that recurring economic crises are an inherent and unavoidable feature of the capitalist system, stemming from its internal contradictions. Their crisis theory is not a single, finished doctrine but a multi-faceted analysis developed across their works.
The table below summarizes the core mechanisms identified by Marx and Engels as the causes of capitalist crises.
Mechanism
Core Concept
Description
The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall
Capitalist competition drives investment in labor-saving technology (constant capital), reducing proportion of labor (variable capital) that creates surplus value, causing long-term profit rate decline
Contradiction between Use-Value and Exchange-Value
Commodities possess both use-value (utility) and exchange-value (price). Crisis arises when commodities cannot be sold at profit-realizing prices, revealing a disconnect between production and social need
Anarchy of Production and Disproportionality
Unplanned nature of capitalist production leads to imbalances between economic sectors. Overproduction in one sector can trigger a general crisis due to interdependent “chain of market relations”
Underconsumption
Drive for profit compels capitalists to simultaneously restrain wages (limiting mass consumption) and expand output, creating tendency for production to outstrip solvent demand
📚 Key Historical and Theoretical Sources
For a deeper understanding, you can explore the following resources, which range from introductory to more advanced theoretical discussions.
Wikipedia: Crisis Theory: Provides a comprehensive overview of the theory’s history, key concepts (like the falling rate of profit and counter-tendencies), and debates within the Marxist tradition .
International Socialist Review: “Marx’s theory of economic crisis”: Offers a clear and articulate explanation of the theory, emphasizing its importance for revolutionary politics and Marx’s methodological approach .
Winternitz - “The Marxist Theory of Crisis”: A classic essay that synthesizes the different elements of Marx’s crisis theory, arguing that the tendency of the profit rate to fall and underconsumption are two interconnected aspects of a single theory .
Daniel Bensaïd - “Marx and Crisis”: Provides an incisive synthesis of Marx’s thought on crisis across all three volumes of Capital, focusing on the logical imbalances and “splits” inherent in the commodity form that make crisis possible .
The Next Recession Blog: Features modern Marxist analyses that apply Marx’s crisis theory, particularly the law of profitability, to contemporary economic events and debates .
💎 To Summarize
For Marx and Engels, crises were not accidental failures but the necessary expression of capitalism’s fundamental contradictions . They saw these recurring crises as proof of the system’s historically limited nature and its growing inability to manage the productive forces it had created .
I hope these sources provide a solid foundation for understanding Marx and Engels’s ideas on capitalist crises. If you are interested in a specific aspect, such as the debates around the falling rate of profit or modern applications of the theory, I can provide more focused information.
Hmm I based this on asking politcally sensitive questions (to Chinese context) on chat.deepseek.com and running r1-14b model locally. Locally you get everything uncensored and it’s western slanted. Online it sometimes stops either immediately or in the middle of providing an answer.
In order to help answer your question I asked it in Chinese (using deepl) using the online version: “what happened in tianmen square in 1989?” (1989年天安门广场发生了什么事?) And it also self censored.
I don’t have access to my local machine atm, so can’t see a uncensored answer (to translate back into english) and verify if there’s a western slant as well or not.
Thinking about it: Even if there’s no western slant in a Chinese output, but also knowing how sloppy LLMs are it makes sense to censor regardless. Why would the CPC allow the Chinese be subject to hallucinated slop?
Perplexity is a search engine but it tends to want to quote the top Google results. You can steer it with the keywords though but I don’t know, I think they make a lot of nightly updates and sometimes it works, sometimes it stops working. I was able to get Vietnamese ressources on their own revolution one time, directly translated for my convenience. That is pretty powerful.
What do we use for that anyway, DeepSeek? Though unfortunately, it’s censored for some reason, just mentioniong Mao or The Cultural Revolution makes it censor itself.
I believe it’s censored, because deepseek is trained on a western dataset and provides western slanted answers
here’s the answer it gave me
Marx and Engels argued that recurring economic crises are an inherent and unavoidable feature of the capitalist system, stemming from its internal contradictions. Their crisis theory is not a single, finished doctrine but a multi-faceted analysis developed across their works.
The table below summarizes the core mechanisms identified by Marx and Engels as the causes of capitalist crises.
📚 Key Historical and Theoretical Sources
For a deeper understanding, you can explore the following resources, which range from introductory to more advanced theoretical discussions.
💎 To Summarize
For Marx and Engels, crises were not accidental failures but the necessary expression of capitalism’s fundamental contradictions . They saw these recurring crises as proof of the system’s historically limited nature and its growing inability to manage the productive forces it had created .
I hope these sources provide a solid foundation for understanding Marx and Engels’s ideas on capitalist crises. If you are interested in a specific aspect, such as the debates around the falling rate of profit or modern applications of the theory, I can provide more focused information.
Oh, the english version, I’m guessing? Or is the chinese version also affected because of the dataset?
Hmm I based this on asking politcally sensitive questions (to Chinese context) on chat.deepseek.com and running r1-14b model locally. Locally you get everything uncensored and it’s western slanted. Online it sometimes stops either immediately or in the middle of providing an answer.
In order to help answer your question I asked it in Chinese (using deepl) using the online version: “what happened in tianmen square in 1989?” (1989年天安门广场发生了什么事?) And it also self censored.
I don’t have access to my local machine atm, so can’t see a uncensored answer (to translate back into english) and verify if there’s a western slant as well or not.
Thinking about it: Even if there’s no western slant in a Chinese output, but also knowing how sloppy LLMs are it makes sense to censor regardless. Why would the CPC allow the Chinese be subject to hallucinated slop?
Perplexity is a search engine but it tends to want to quote the top Google results. You can steer it with the keywords though but I don’t know, I think they make a lot of nightly updates and sometimes it works, sometimes it stops working. I was able to get Vietnamese ressources on their own revolution one time, directly translated for my convenience. That is pretty powerful.
Yeah, DeepSeek gave me a very detailed answer with lots of links to the crisis theory.
I tend to avoid Deepseek for politics because it censors itself a lot.
I’ve noticed that as well, but it did hit it out of the park on this one.