Workers' Liberty

Trevor Evans is a professor at the Berlin School of Economics, and has also worked in Nicaragua and other countries. He has written especially on the interrelation between finance and capitalist crises. He spoke to Martin Thomas.

Interest rates increased by one-tenth from May to June. The leap from 3% to 3.3% is the largest increase since 1997. The increase prompted Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, to write to Chancellor Alistair Darling explaining that the “rise can be accounted for by large and, until recently, unanticipated increases in the prices of food, fuel, gas and electricity”. No kidding Mr King!

This is an odd sort of crisis for a Marxist. If you had read Marxist crisis theory at a fairly abstract level, I think you would be a bit puzzled by this crisis.

1. Fred Moseley: The Long Trends of Profit
2. Costas Lapavitsas: A New Sort of Financial Crisis
3. Leo Panitch: The Crisis Depends on the Fightback
4. Simon Mohun: An Era of Rampant Inequality

Last week thousands of garment workers in Bangladesh went on strike in protest at rising food prices. Factory workers earn as little as a $1 a day and have seen the price of rice increase by a third since last year. Some 30 million people in Bangladesh – nearly a quarter of the population — may be going without a daily meal.

Leo Panitch has been editor of the annual Socialist Register in recent years, during which it has produced issues on "Working Classes, Global Realities" (2001), "The New Imperial Challenge" (2004), and "The Empire Reloaded" (2005). He is also the author of many books and articles, several co-written with Sam Gindin, former research director for the Canadian Auto Workers Union (CAW). He is active in the Socialist Project group, http://www.socialistproject.ca/, and is a professor at York University, Toronto.

Simon Mohun has done extensive research on the development of productive and unproductive labour (in the Marxist sense, i.e. labour which does or does not produce surplus value), especially in the USA. He is a professor of economics at Queen Mary University of London.

Costas Lapavitsas is a Marxist economist specialising in the study of financial systems. His writings include the chapter on money in Anti-Capitalism: A Marxist Guide (edited by Alfredo Saad Filho), and he is a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Interview by Martin Thomas

It is now "arguably the worst financial crisis in seven decades", according to Gillian Tett in the Financial Times (18 March).

With this issue of Solidarity we begin a series of interviews with Marxist economists on the current crisis and the current stage of capitalism. Fred Moseley is the author of a distinctive Marxist account of the decline in profit rates which brought crisis in the 1970s and 80s, one has spawned a whole series of further studies.

Review of Who Runs Britain? How the Super Rich are Changing our Lives by Robert Peston (Hodder and Stoughton)

“No nation”, Frederick Engels once wrote, “will put up with production conducted by trusts [i.e. big, industry-dominating cartels], with so barefaced an exploitation of the community by a small band of dividend-mongers...

“All comparisons with the 1970s are absurd”, squeaked one of Gordon Brown’s media people, embarrassed about the Government’s decision on 17 February to nationalise Northern Rock.

Document Of AWL Conference 2008

1. The UK has not had an actual recession since 1990-2. Manufacturing went into recession in 2001, but not the whole economy. People under the age of about 30 generally have no living memory of a recession.

A revolutionary alternative to both “free” trade and “fair” trade is the perspective held by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL). It is based on the core ideas of Marxists a century ago, applied to the circumstances we live in today.

When the scandal broke about a single trader running up £4.7 billion in losses for the French bank Société Général, the first response from financiers was shock because they thought Société Général was particularly well-regulated — “the gold standard”, one called it.

The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism is a recent book written by left-wing writer, journalist and broadcaster Naomi Klein (author of No Logo).

There are a lot of myths about accounting. Some of them accountants don’t like — which have to do with their being drab failures as human beings. But they put up with those myths, because they make such a lot of money out of the other set of myths.

Workers' Liberty 3/17 examines the facts about world trade, the arguments about fair trade, the lessons to be learned from the writings of Marx and Engels, and the outlines of a socialist policy. Download pdf here, or read online.

Will the stock-market crash of 21 January continue, or ease? We don't know. But what about the monolines?

An editorial in the Financial Times (21 January) summed up well the Government's new plan for the collapsed bank Northern Rock.

On December 22 2007, Andrew Glyn, left wing economist and prolific author of books and articles about capitalism, died of a brain tumour.

I attended two sessions discussing the current credit crisis at the conference on 9-11 November sponsored by Historical Materialism magazine. The two sessions offered very different views on the crisis, with disappointingly little interaction.

Here is a PowerPoint presentation on commodities, value, wage-labour, profit, and capital. It is designed as back-up for talking through the issues, rather than as a stand-alone. You may find it useful when reviewing your notes from a study group on these issues, or when leading a study group.

Even with Labour and the Conservatives outdoing each other to be the party of big business and wealth, some poor people are still popular at Westminster — that is poor people in other countries. Laments for the scale of global poverty and a stern faced insistence on the need to do something about it are becoming the favoured recourse of every politician, most obviously Gordon Brown.

The Liberal Democrats are calling on the Government to nationalise the failed bank Northern Rock, and denouncing New Labour from being held back from this course by "ideological preoccupations".

“You can expect”, writes US economist Nouriel Roubini, “that the ongoing credit crunch will get much worse in the year ahead and its fallout will spread from the US to Europe and throughout Asia and the globe.

Where do profits come from? How can wage-labour reasonably be described as wage-slavery? If a worker makes a free contract, as an individual equal before the law, with an employer, isn’t that a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work?

“Britain remains a nation dominated by class division”, reported the Guardian on 20 October. The division is dramatised by David Cameron’s Tory front bench, which includes no fewer than 15 men schooled at Eton. The Lib Dem leadership contest is being fought out by two men schooled at Westminster, a school almost as posh as Eton.