Marxism and theory of crises

The thesis of "ruinous competition"

1 - Ruinous competition The first service of Robert Brenner's book-length study of The Economics of Global Turbulence (New Left Review no.229) is a demolition of the myth of unparallelled US prosperity in the 1990s. Output, investment, and productivity all grew unusually slowly for a boom phase in the regular boom-slump cycle. Wages mostly stagnated. The limited advances in profit rates, and their exaggerated reflection in the gaudy rise of the stock market, were only the flipside of a punishing war against labour, described well by Brenner. Brenner's book also does two other major services...

An exchange on crises and the "Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall"

Criticism by Phil Ferguson of the notes Marx on capitalist crisis , and a response by Martin Thomas . This is a very strange analysis. They dismiss Marx’s point in the Grundrisse about the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall being “the single most important law of political economy”, use a lot of earlier stuff that Marx wrote about the possibilities of crisis being inherent in capitalism, and the development of a money economy (the kind of stuff which has been long since assimilated by bourgeois economists) and then claim that the TRPF “was elevated to the status of ‘the Marxist...

Keynes, crisis, Marx, and Keynesianism

By Martin Thomas John Maynard Keynes posed many sharp questions about capitalism, often further developing ideas which Marx had sketched before him. He framed the whole issue as one of "safeguarding capitalism", but can "Keynesian" methods really do that? This article (download as pdf, see "attachment" below) from Workers' Liberty 32, June 1996, surveys Keynes's insights and criticises bowdlerised "Keynesianism". It discusses Keynes's ideas on the dichotomy between money and other commodities; on the possible "liquidity trap"; on the "multiplier"; on the falling tendency of the rate of profit...

Capitalist crisis and workers' plan: London AWL study course, 2008

1: The general Marxist theory of capitalist crisis 2: Issues in the theory of crisis 3: Capitalism since 1980 4: Why banks go bust: the "credit crunch" 5: "Bankers' socialism" and workers' socialism 6: Workers' plan Reading: Excerpts from Marx at http://www.workersliberty.org/crisis Views from various Marxist economists on the current crisis at http://www.workersliberty.org/crisis2008 Coverage from Solidarity on the current crisis at http://www.workersliberty.org/crisis2007 Points for a workers' plan for the crisis: http://www.workersliberty.org/workersplan

Marx on capitalist crisis

Notes from Brisbane Workers' Liberty study course (2000), edited and rearranged. Right-click here to download the notes as a Word document ; or read online, below. 1. Money versus commodities. Capital volume 1 chapter 3 section 2A, "The metamorphosis of commodities". In chapter 1 volume 3 of Capital volume 1, Marx argues that any society where most goods and services take the form of commodities must also single out one special commodity , money, as the general social approximation of average social labour. Money is a commodity, but it also stands apart from other commodities. This standing...

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