Economics

The most important years in human history

“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. ” (Chapter 10 Capital, Marx) Debra Roberts, one of the authors of the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said that: “the next few years are the most important in our history” (by “our” she is referring to all humanity). “Pathways limiting global warming to 1. 5°C with no or limited overshoot [which is what we need to avoid ‘snowballing’ climate change] would require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and...

Fighting capital or just a greedy few?

Published at the close of September, Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts’ Corbynism — A Critical Approach is not always an easy read. Bolton and Pitts go well beyond the argument that Corbyn does not understand antisemitism, does not really like the European Union, is a bit of a populist, and has a history (and present) of hanging out with some dubious characters. Rather, their book attempts to “elucidate the essential characteristics of Corbynism as a political orientation (and) outline and critique the general worldview which motivates such a platform”. It seeks to do so on the basis of...

Samir Amin, 1931-2018

Samir Amin, who died this year at the age of 87, was one of the foremost writers of the “dependency theory” which, in the 1960s and 70s came, many left-wing activists came to think was “the Marxist theory of imperialism”. Many even thought it was “Lenin’s theory”, although the whole structure of the theory was different. Amin, of Egyptian-French background, lived most of his life in France, and was in the French Communist Party then associated with Maoists. The basic idea of “dependency theory” was that ex-colonial countries were underdeveloped because of a drain of surplus to the richer...

Luxemburg, economics, crises, and the national question

This article seeks to review and reflect on the two volumes of Rosa Luxemburg's Complete Works published so far. Only a scattering - a much thicker scattering since the 1970s, but still a scattering - of Luxemburg's writings have been available in English until now. Since the 1970s there has been a "Collected Works" in German. Even that misses out a lot. The new Complete Works, edited by Peter Hudis, will be fourteen volumes. As Hudis explained in an article in Solidarity 356 (11/3/15: bit.ly/hudis-rl), "given the amount of time, care, and attention that she gave to developing her major...

Nationalising money?

At the session on nationalising the banks at the AWL’s Ideas for Freedom event (21-24 June), we had, alongside Patrick Murphy speaking for that policy, a speaker from the campaign group Positive Money. The Positive Money speaker told us that their policy is for “nationalising money” rather than nationalising banks. He presented it as a left-wing policy, similar in drift to but different in detail from public ownership and control of banks. In fact the proposal for “nationalising money” has a right-wing pedigree and logic. It originates in the Chicago Plan of 1933, written by economists who...

Moishe Postone 1942-2018

The Marxist writer Moishe Postone, best-known for his 1993 book Time, Labour, and Social Domination , died on 21 March at the age of 75. He was also well known for his critique of left antisemitism. Born in Canada, he first studied for a degree in biochemistry at Chicago University, but then moved to studying history. He recalled a big student occupation in 1969, and a reading group on Hegel and Marx which came out of it, as turning-points in his development. He went to do further postgraduate study at Frankfurt University with Iring Fetscher, a philosopher in the tradition of the “Frankfurt...

Share price wobble gives warning

As Solidarity goes to press on 13 February, the Dow Jones and S&P 500 share price indices in New York have been recovering since 8 February, though they are still at a lower level than when they suddenly dipped on 1 February. The FTSE 100 index in London, the DAX index in Frankfurt, and the CAC 40 index in Paris, have all been recovering since 9 February, but are lower than their recent highs on 29 January, 23 January, and 26 January respectively. So far, the early February downturn looks like a limited wobble in a pattern of rising share prices since 2009. The S&P 500 has risen from an index...

Overcoming markets

Yanis Varoufakis: Talking to my daughter about the economy: a brief history of capitalism (Bodley Head 2017) Yanis Varoufakis, the Athens professor of economics who was finance minister for the first five months of the Syriza government in Greece, resigned when Syriza complied with international capitalist diktats, and now leads the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM), has written a good plea for socialism. The book is due out in paperback in July. The coming era, he argues, “will be typified by the momentous clash between two opposing proposals: ‘Democratise everything!’ versus “Commodify...

Buy out boom points to slump

Editorial from Solidarity 460 “Private equity” — the industry that raises funds from wealthy people to buy out wobbly companies, take them off the stock markets, ruthlessly chop costs and sell off assets, get them profitable, and then sell them off again at a premium — is booming. According to the Financial Times (24 January), “buy-out groups are setting new records for fund-raising”. They’re even turning away cash from rich people keen to get in on their operations. And the volume of buy-outs they do rose 27% from 2016 to 2017. This boom is likely to lead to a crash. “Private equity”...

“The Bible of the working class”

Click here to download whole pull-out as pdf Karl Marx’s book Capital was published 150 years ago, on 14 September 1867, the fruits of over fifteen years’ study. Marx was then fairly well-known in the European and US workers’ movements, through his activity in the First International, founded in September 1864. His Communist Manifesto of 1848, which had become a rarity since revolutionary socialist activity receded in the early 1850s, had been republished and translated, and was circulating well. Capital appeared first in a German edition. There was no “Marxist” group in Germany at the time —...

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