Economics

Marxists on the capitalist crisis: 1. Fred Moseley - The Long Trends Of Profit

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. He is professor of economics at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, USA. His books include The Falling Rate of Profit in the Postwar United States Economy (1991), and he edited the English edition of Enrique Dussel's Towards an Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the...

Barefaced exploitation by the super-rich

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... “The exploitation is so palpable that it must break down...” Engels was too optimistic. Robert Peston is the BBC’s Business Editor; a former journalist on the right-wing Sunday Telegraph; a man who avows that “much of what Margaret Thatcher did was necessary”, and...

Socialism for the rich!

“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. “The man running it has credibility in the City, it will be run on a commercial basis..” There is nothing “welfare-state”-ish about this nationalisation! No, sir! “Credibility in the City” is still the highest principle! Actually nationalisation cannot but be a “social” measure. It is even a “welfare state” measure. Only... the “welfare” being tended to is the welfare of the rich. According to the writer Gore Vidal:...

What Now for the World Economy?

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. We do not know whether the recession now underway will spread into a full-scale world recession, or how big the effects in Britain of a world recession may be. But there is a serious probability of a serious downturn. 2. It would be foolish to assume that a slump will necessarily provoke a burst of working-class industrial combativity. Trotsky pointed out...

Socialist policy on trade

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. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels first wrote about world trade in the 1840s, when British capitalism was the dominant industrial force in the world economy and free trade had just become the commercial policy of the British government. In England the Corn Laws that had kept the price of food high (and the landowners rich) were repealed in 1846, sparking a great...

How many more bubbles to burst?

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. Now France’s finance minister says that “internal control procedures didn’t work”. It is not a problem of Société Général. It is an endemic problem of capitalism, and especially of the highly “financialised” capitalism of the period since 1980. For all that the apologists of capitalism will tell you that the system fosters...

Keeping the victims in disaster mode

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 ). The book’s central theme revolves around how for the past 50 years, neo-conservatives, adherents of the right-wing economist Milton Friedman, have been consciously initiating and exploiting “shock” events to bring about “free market capitalism” and to destroy the public sphere (a theme which was featured in No Logo). By shocking and cowing populations into submission, corporations, backed up by right wing governments, have been able to...

Open the books!

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. The other mythology says that accounting is not only dull but also fiendishly complicated financial engineering. So the accountants who write and decipher companies’ financial reports deserve massive salaries: civilians would be baffled and bewildered if they tried to join in. Some accounting is startlingly dull, some is difficult. Quite a lot is...

Workers' Liberty 3/17: free trade, fair trade, and socialism

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. Fair trade, free trade, and socialism Free trade Fair trade Localisation Socialist policy on trade Marx's major works on foreign trade Proudhon, patron saint of fair trade Independent working-class politics in the Third World South Africa: workers defeat apartheid

Capitalism is crazy: private profits, social losses

Will the stock-market crash of 21 January continue, or ease? We don't know. But what about the monolines? The monolines? They are a fairly specialised part of the financial sphere. Yet their current crisis could have huge repercussions. That is how capital works. Hiccups in the tricks and speculations of tiny cliques of financiers can wreck the livelihoods of millions. In early 2007, low-security, high-interest mortgage lending in the USA went into crisis. By the end of 2006, those "subprime" mortgages totalled about $1.5 trillion, of which $600 billion had originated in 2006 alone. A lot of...

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