Kevin Cox
Department of Geography
Ohio State University

Introduction
Marxists commonly see the current global economic crisis in terms of overaccumulation: crisis results from capital’s tendency to overproduce. Every capital speculates on future demand for its product through the anticipated advantages that its competitive strategies will provide. In other words, each capital produces at a level that assumes that it will push the opposition to the wall and rapidly take advantage of their competitive failures. But since all competitors are doing the same thing, overcapacity is the inevitable outcome. This is complemented by the other side of the competitive coin: downward pressure on wages, thus limiting the size of the market. Wage depression has been aggravated through the construction of a New International Division of Labor in which wage costs are reduced still further by off-shoring; the so-called ‘race to the bottom.’1 This is to adhere to Simon Clarke’s (1990) view of overaccumulationcrises.