In this paper I intend to contrast the `falling rate of profit' crisis theories of the 1970s with the `underconsumptionism' of the orthodox Marxist tradition. The central argument is that in rejecting traditional underconsumptionist theories of crisis contemporary Marxism has thrown the baby out with the bathwater, with unfortunate theoretical and political consequences. A more adequate critique of traditional underconsumptionism leads not to the falling rate of profit, but to a disproportionality theory of crisis, which follows the traditional theory in seeing crises not as epochal events but as expressions of the permanent tendencies of capitalist accumulation.
