Economics

Marxist economists analyse the crisis

Click here to download all the texts (in date order, with some typographical corrections, and including some texts not listed below) Antecedents and sequels of the crisis : discussion notes by Martin Thomas on the first two "rounds", November 2010. December 2008 onwards: second comments, and some new contributors 1. Michel Husson: The Crisis of Neo-Liberal Capitalism 2. Fred Moseley: The Bondholders and the Taxpayers 3. Leo Panitch: The Chain Broke at its Weakest Link 4. Andrew Kliman: The Level of Debt is Astronomical 5. David Laibman: The Onset of Great Depression II: Conceptualising the...

Fair trade, free trade, and socialism

Trade is a vital part of the neoliberal economic, political and ideological regime that now dominates the world economy and most national states. At various summits in recent years the world’s most powerful governments have promised to introduce a better deal on trade, aid and debt for the world’s poorest countries, especially in Africa. At the same time, there are many charities and NGOs making proposals to make trade fairer. A number of organisations came together in 2006 in the Make Poverty History coalition, call for trade justice. Others advocate buying only goods with the fairtrade mark...

Socialism is not about “good old days”

French Trotskyists used to talk of “miserabilism” as a fault to be avoid. The then-mass French Communist Party, into the 1960s, had insisted that workers’ living standards in Western Europe were always going down, down, down. One sub-section of the French Trotskyists, even, long held it as dogma that “the productive forces” were continuously declining. Such sob-stuff is not true. And it amounts to telling workers both that all their organising, strikes, and protests could not avail, and that the old Marxist idea of capitalist development creating the basis for socialism is losing grip. Our...

Capitalist markets block social foresight

In his book Revolution Betrayed , evidently thinking through lessons from “war communism” in 1918-21, Trotsky argued that a workers’ government (and not just in poverty-blighted Russia) would for a long time use goods and services markets to signal costs, but would push aside financial markets. “The budget and credit mechanism is wholly adequate for a planned distribution of the national income. And as to prices, they will serve the cause of socialism better, the more honestly they being to express the real economic relations of the present day”. Even in bourgeois economic writing, the...

Popes, presidents, and markets

“I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope... But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody”, said the US political operator James Carville. Under capitalism, capitalists as well as workers are dominated by “the markets”, an entity constructed by humans but which then dominates us. Falling unemployment, for example, is regularly reported as “bad news for markets”. Fully-developed socialism means “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”, with economic life consciously...

Think outside the box of capitalism!

Colin Chalmers, author of the newly published Capital Condensed , spoke to Solidarity . The idea of the book was just to condense what Marx said in Capital into something that was more easily readable and much, much shorter. Capital is divided into 18 parts and I’ve always been surprised that no one has actually written a guide to Capital that just went through those 18 parts. There’s quite a few guides to the first volume, some of which are very good, and one or two go a bit further, but they don’t take all 18 parts, from all three volumes, and just go through the arguments. There is a very...

Inflation, disinflation, and exploitation

Under capitalism, both inflation and disinflation (measures to slow inflation) hurt workers. When prices go up, real wages go down, unless workers win wage increases to match. We have done that in some periods, or even won guarantees of monthly pay rises keeping pace with prices. Disinflation, by cutting back public works and public services, by raising taxes, or by raising interest rates, generally leads to higher unemployment. Workers can fight back by demanding public services, shorter work-weeks, and shifting taxes onto the rich. It’s often more difficult than fighting the effects of...

A critique of Modern Monetary Theory

"MMTers junk a lot of the most interesting stuff about Post-Keynesian economics.... Inspired by Knapp’s chartalist theory, they minimize the role of private credit demand in driving the economy; like Friedman they believe the government drives the creation of money (Friedman through the central bank, MMT through federal spending). Wray, who once wrote a book on the topic, now dismisses endogenous money as a 'trivial advance' next to MMT..." Doug Henwood analyses and criticises Modern Monetary Theory https://jacobin.com/2019/02/modern-monetary-theory-isnt-helping .

The ambiguities of Hayek

Andrew Gamble, author of Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty , talked with Martin Thomas from Solidarity about the recent new biography Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950 , by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger. Friedrich Hayek was an economist who in 1944, and for the rest of his life, especially in the Thatcher years 1979-90, became the leading writer of the free-market right. This new biography gives more detail and context to the change that Hayek made during the 1940s, switching his main interests from economics to politics, ideology and philosophy. After he moved to Chicago in 1950, his career in...

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