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over excess capital/excess commodity in Marxist crisis theory. The Limits to Capital
in fact considers crisis of accumulation in terms of devalorisation/devaluation of
capital(‘a necessary moment of the realization process’); so that it can contrast
incessant devaluation of capital with ‘devaluation through crisis’. Overproduction of
capital is overaccumulation of capital; Marx’s falling-rate-of-profit theory argues that
capitalist resort to technological and organisational change for increased surplus-value
production would salvage a surplus of capital ‘relative to opportunities to employ that
capital’(ibid.:192). So it is through the turnover of capital that a segment of social
capital would be redundant. And when the very mechanism of turnover adjourns
itself momentarily and devalorises that surplus of capital, there can be further
accumulation. In Harvey’s words, ‘if the amount of capital in circulation is to remain
in balance with the limited capacity to realize that capital through production and
exchange –a condition implied by the stabilization of the rate of profit- then a portion
of the total capital must be eliminated’(ibid.). Concepts of overaccumulation and
devaluation are not aberrations vis-a-vis the understanding of crisis as a more
substantial or even immutable system of contradictions under capitalism. To the
contrary, these concepts can expatiate well on the structural crisis as the very
approfondissement of cyclical crisis. Valorisation as well as devalorisation are not
impeccable mechanisms; devaluation and turnover are basically heuristic concepts for
the phenomenon of capitalist crisis and the approfondissement of the system’s inner
contradictions.
Piecemeal devaluations(i.e. devaluations of a segment of the overall capital) are part
of the turnover system –these are ongoing forms of devaluation. Centralisation of
capital is one such form in that when small competitors sell out to large competitors,
this ‘deprives the former of their capital thorough a kind of expropriation which in
effect devalues their capital’. Or ‘if a part of the capital in society circulates in such a
way that it claims only a portion of the surplus value it helps to produce, then surplus
value is released which can be distributed among the remaining capitalists so as to
stabilize the rate of profit’(ibid.:198). Devaluations other than ‘devaluations through
crisis’ in Marx and Harvey is a prolusion for a theory of crisis as devaluation. In that
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