Crisis opening in 2007

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...

Regrouping the left

Eleven years on from 2008, inequality is spiralling, the signs are that we’re heading for another crash, and mainstream ruling-class politics is veering away from neo-liberalism only towards the nationalist right. The working classes of the world need a political movement which fights for socialism as working-class self-emancipation, as a full-scale change of society to social ownership and democratic control of productive wealth. It needs socialists who focus on agitating and educating positively for socialist ideas, not merely on nay-saying and reactive opposition to day-to-day bourgeois...

High finance: take back control

The banks and high finance should be converted into a public banking, mortgage, and pension service, under public ownership and democratic and workers’ control. Public ownership and democratic control will also provide the means to stop a reforming government being sabotaged by a “strike” or “flight” of capital, as France’s reforming government was in the early 1980s. Britain’s big four banks made about £22 billion profits in 2018-9. That is more than the total of £19 billion per year required, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies in October 2018, to end the cuts in welfare, schools...

Economics and learning from the facts

Martin Thomas’s book Crisis and Sequels: Capitalism and the New Economic Turmoil since 2007 is constructed around 32 interviews, discussions, and debates with left wing economists and other thinkers. It takes the reader; mostly chronologically, along the timeline from the immediate aftermath of the crash itself in 2007-8 across the next decade, up to 2016. Thomas offers a substantial introduction, with overviews of the debates that take place across the book between the various contributors and himself. Issues in debate centre around Marx’s “tendency of the rate of profit to fall”, US hegemony...

A new humanist politics?

Paul Mason’s latest book, Clear Bright Future , is written as a defence of humanism and human-centred politics, against the resurgent threat of the far-right, from Trump to Bolsonaro, Le Pen to Salvini. The title is a reference to Leon Trotsky’s testament. Mason entreats us to fight “all evil, oppression, and violence”, and shares Trotsky’s optimism for the future. Mason draws a convincing link from the financial crash in 2007-08 to Trump’s election. Mason emphasises how the monopolisation of information (think Google and Facebook) has led to systems outside our control, for example, of online...

Crisis and Sequels out in paperback

Martin Thomas outlines the guide he followed in compiling Crisis and Sequels, a book on the 2007-8 crash and its aftermath now out in paperback edition. “Analysis must proceed not from a blurred outline of a ‘typical’ capitalist economy, but from the complex reality of a world economy with its own structure and within it national economies substantially different in pattern both from the global structure and from each other”. Crisis and Sequels is built round 32 interviews with or contributions by 15 economists, organised into five chronological sections as the 2007­8 crash and its sequels...

From 2008 to fighting capitalism

When the housing bubble burst and a full-blown financial crisis developed in 2008 I was ten years old. I lived in an upper-class neighbourhood, so very few people around me were greatly affected by the crisis. 2008, however, would come to bother me for years after the recession ended. At the time I didn’t know any socialists or truly understand what socialism meant. However, when the newly elected president, one who promised “hope” and “change”, bailed out the very same businesses that caused millions around the world to lose their jobs, something felt wrong. By the time I entered high school...

Bankers’ greed brings us down

“For questions about the survival of big European banks to be swirling almost ten years after the financial crisis started is utterly damning”, writes the big business magazine The Economist. Questions are indeed swirling. On 26 October, the Bank of England asked British banks to say how much they are owed by Germany’s huge Deutsche Bank and Italy’s oldest bank, MPS, in case those banks prove unable to pay. Deutsche Bank’s share price has fallen by over 50% this year. The stock markets value this giant of international banking at less than Snapchat, a social-media business with a few hundred...

The world of neoliberalism, three years on

Three years ago, we surveyed “the world of neoliberalism” as it had emerged from the 2008 financial crash and the acute phase in 2010-12 of the eurozone government-debt crisis. Many patterns have continued since 2013. Overall economic growth has been slow by historical standards, even slower by comparison with the rates expected in recovery from a big slump. Of the global growth, the bulk, 63% in 2015-6, has been in China and India, and the Chinese growth figures are dubious. Output per worker-hour in the USA has stagnated, rising at only 0.4% a year between late 2010 and 2016. Real median...

Make banks public utilities!

Banks should be public utilities, or at least so closely regulated that they must behave like public utilities. They shouldn’t be free to do whatever brings most profit to their bosses and shareholders. If you’re a regular reader, you will know that’s Solidarity ’s view. You may not be surprised to hear that in 2012 the TUC voted for public ownership and democratic control of the banks. You may be disappointed that the new Labour Party leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell has not yet taken that TUC demand into their economic policy, or that Bernie Sanders in the USA calls only for...

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