In fairness to Butcher's, this isn't really Marx's explanation of the economic crisis, it's a underconsumptionist, Keynesian, explanation. The crisis does come from the change in the ratio of dead labour to living labour, the rise in the organic composition of capital.
Well no disproportionality theory is not the same thing as underconsumptionist theory at all. It is about uneven growth between different sectors of the economy due to the fact that enterprises produce "blindly" for the market and do not coordinate their output with other enterprises. So there is a relative overproduction in one part of the economy leading to cutbacks which have knock on effects resulting ultimiately in an economic crisis.
This is Marx's theory of crisis. It is not the same as the "profit squeeze" thesis advanced by people like Glyn and Sutcliffe in
British Capitalism, Workers and the Profit Squeeze (Penguin Books, 1972) - a thesis which I think Butchers holds though I am not entiurely sure about this. Admittedly it can easily be read as a marxist theory of crisis insofar as Marx himself talked about the "fall in the rate of profit consequent upon the general rise of wages"
Value Price and Profit) At first blush this might appear to lend credence to the claim that economic crisis is a consequence of workers "pricing themselves out of job", as the expression goes, by imposing unrealistic wage demands on their employers, eroding the latter's profit margins. Marx's observation above as well as his comment that " crises are always prepared by a period in which wages generally rise" might seem to support this conclusion.
However, Marx was adamant that the wage rate was the
dependent variable, while the rate of capital accumulation or investment (which in turn is heavily influenced by the rate of profit) was the independent variable.(Capital Volume I p. 770). In other words,
the ability of workers to secure increased wages was dependent upon the profitability of the businesses employing them. This was the point I put to Butchers but he evidently didnt see the significance of it. He is mistaking the symptoms for the cause of the problem.
If profit margins are too low, a large wage increase could jeopardise the very viability of the business. Then, should that business collapse, the workers employed in it would cease to have a job. Not only that, the consequence of this would be to swell the "industrial reserve army" of the unemployed. The larger the size of that army, the greater the downward pressure it would tend to exert on the wages of workers still currently employed. That, in turn, would tend to enhance the profit margins of existing firms and thus, on the face of it, serve to avert a crisis.
In any case as people like Brenner have pointed out, the crisis of 1974 was a fairly generalised one affecting a large number of countries irrespective of whether they had a strong tradition of labour militancy or not ("The economics of global turbulence", New Left Review no. 229 May/June 1998 ). So it is difficult to see how labour militancy as such could have been a factor in this crisis. Rather it is something that tends to be responsive to changing economic circumstances instead of directly bring about these changing circumstances
BTW there is quite an interesting article from the Education department of the SPGB on economic crises. Its a bit dated but still very useful . Check it out at
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/Education Series Crises.html
