I’ve been trying to get this question straight in my own head for a while now. It surfaced in the last piece on housing, and in many ways draws on arguments I’ve been working through more fully in Breaking Dependency: Ireland’s Struggle for Class Power and Sovereignty, but here I want to isolate the question more directly.
On the left, it is common to hear capitalism described as a system in crisis. It is a familiar phrase, almost taken for granted. But the more I have thought about it, the more I have begun to question what exactly is meant by it. Because if capitalism is always in crisis, as it has been described for decades, even centuries, then how does a system in a constant state of crisis continue not only to survive, but to expand, adapt, and deepen its reach?
This is not a new question. From the crisis tendencies identified by Karl Marx, through the analysis of monopoly and imperialism developed by Vladimir Lenin, to more recent attempts to understand how instability is displaced across space and society, there has long been an effort to explain not just why capitalism breaks down, but how it continues.
At first glance, the idea of crisis seems self-evident. Housing systems that no longer provide homes. Health services under constant strain. The cost of living rising faster than wages. Work becoming more insecure. And overhanging all of it, the ecological question, which is no longer abstract. If this is not crisis, it is difficult to know what would qualify.
But there is another side to this. At the same time as these pressures intensify, wealth is concentrating at extraordinary speed. Large firms are not retreating; they are consolidating. Financial markets continue to expand. New technologies are opening new terrains for accumulation, particularly as productive investment yields lower returns and capital increasingly flows toward speculative and financial activity. From the standpoint of those who own and direct capital, the system does not present itself as being in breakdown. In many respects, it appears to be stabilising and extending its reach.
That tension is not accidental. It has been there from the beginning.
The development of capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries was marked by repeated crises. Financial crashes, industrial downturns, waves of bankruptcy. But these moments did not fragment the system. They concentrated it. Firms that could not survive disappeared or were absorbed. Capital became more centralised. Markets became more integrated. What emerged was not a dispersed field of small producers, but an increasingly monopolised structure.
This is the movement that Lenin sought to theorise. Competition does not remain at the level of many small actors indefinitely. It tends toward concentration. Crisis accelerates that process. It forces weaker capitals out and strengthens those with the scale, access to finance, and – increasingly – the backing of state institutions necessary to endure. Over time, this produces a system where economic power, financial power, political power, and state power become closely intertwined on a global scale.
From that perspective, crisis is not simply a sign of failure. It is one of the ways the system reorganises itself.
None of this means capitalism has not been historically productive or technologically transformative. Its capacity to develop productive forces is precisely what has made it so historically powerful. A more orthodox reading might therefore argue that crises are corrective, that they clear inefficiencies and allow growth to resume. There is some truth in that. But it leaves out the question of who bears the cost.
Once that is brought back in, the pattern looks different. The 2008 financial crisis did not simply reset the system. Financial institutions were stabilised through unprecedented state intervention, while the costs were displaced onto public finances, onto services, onto living standards. In the years that followed, asset values recovered and wealth became more concentrated. What appeared as a general crisis was, in practice, highly selective.
You can see the same dynamic in housing. What presents itself as crisis – shortage and unaffordability – is experienced very differently depending on position. For those trying to secure a home, it is immediate and material. For large property holders and investment funds, the same conditions underpin rising rents, rising valuations, and expansion. The system is not failing to produce housing. It is producing housing in a form aligned with accumulation.
At this point, it becomes possible to state the argument more clearly: that the system is in permanent contradiction, but not in permanent danger of collapse, because it has mechanisms to offload and reorganise those contradictions; and crucially, what is experienced as crisis is class-specific.
That is the thread that runs through everything. Crisis is real, but it is not evenly distributed. It is mediated through class relations. Those with ownership, scale, and access to state power are far better placed to absorb shocks and reshape the conditions around them. Those without are more directly exposed to the consequences.
None of this means there are no tensions within the system itself. There clearly are. The dominance of the United States is increasingly contested, most clearly by the rise of China. Economic blocs are repositioning. Supply chains, trade routes, and financial systems are being reorganised. These are real developments, and they reflect genuine instability within the existing global order.
At the same time, the global system remains deeply unequal and continues to operate through structures of concentrated economic, financial, and military power. What is changing is not the disappearance of those structures, but growing tension around who directs them, how development is organised, and who ultimately benefits from the existing international order.
Nor does the existence of permanent contradiction necessarily mean capitalism is on the verge of collapse. Historically, the system has shown a remarkable capacity to survive crisis precisely because it can redistribute its pressures outward. Economic shocks are displaced onto weaker economies. Environmental costs are externalised. Financial risk is transferred onto the public. Labour is made more flexible, more precarious, more exposed. These mechanisms do not resolve the underlying contradictions, but they allow the system to reorganise itself and continue operating.
There are limits to this, particularly in relation to ecological breakdown. Climate change cannot be displaced indefinitely. It feeds back into the system in ways that are harder to contain. Even here, however, the immediate effects are uneven. Those with resources are better able to insulate themselves. Those without are more exposed.
Without some form of organised response, crisis remains what it has so often been: a mechanism through which the system renews itself.
The point is not to deny the reality of crisis, but to locate it more precisely. What we are witnessing is not a system collapsing under its own weight, but one that continues to function by shifting its contradictions onto those who labour within it. The instability is real. The pressure is real and deeply felt. But it is not distributed randomly.
So the question is not simply whether capitalism is in crisis. It is why, in each period of disruption, those who produce the wealth are the ones forced to absorb the costs, while those who own and control that wealth are able, more often than not, to emerge with their position secured – and frequently strengthened. For labour, crisis is lived materially. For capital, it is often experienced as restructuring, consolidation, and adaptation.
If that pattern holds, then crisis on its own does not point towards resolution. It points towards repetition – unless something intervenes to change how its costs are allocated, who has the power to decide that, and ultimately whether a system can remain structurally contradictory without being immediately existentially threatened, precisely because it externalises those contradictions through class and imperial relations.
