Kapitalismen i krise (1) 2008

• Section: Economic Analysis (online at Internet Archive)

Radical Statistics (UK)
“We believe that statistics can be used to support radical campaigns for progressive social change.”

Socialist Worker (US)

• Section: Economy
  “SW Online’s ongoing coverage and analysis.”

United for a Fair Economy (UFE)
“UFE raises awareness that concentrated wealth and power undermine the economy, corrupt democracy, deepen the racial divide, and tear communities apart.”

World-Crisis.net: Financial & Economic Crisis
With news articles from the mainstream press (online at Internet Archive WayBackMachine)

A World to Win

• Resources: The Credit Crunch explainer
  “What is behind the credit crunch? How does the global financial crisis affect jobs, living standards and housing? Can capitalism get a grip and solve the crisis? What policies should we campaign for?”

Articles

Against the Current

• The Editors: Whose wipeout? Whose bailout? (No.137, November/December 2008). “Elsewhere in this issue, Jack Rasmus looks at the realities of massive job losses and the unfolding recession; here we’ll focus on the politics of the bankers’ bailout.”
• Jack Rasmus: The crisis beneath the bailout (No.137, November/December 2008). “It is all leading to what this writer elsewhere has termed an Epic Recession, a downturn unlike any since the 1930s … It is not a typical postwar traditional recession, nor yet a true global depression, but an unstable condition with a tendency to evolve from the former to the latter.”
• Bob Brenner: Devastating crisis unfolds (No.132, January/February 2008). “The current crisis could well turn out to be the most devastating since the Great Depression. It manifests profound, unresolved problems in the real economy that have been – literally – papered over by debt for decades, as well as a shorter term financial crunch of a depth unseen since World War II.”
  See also Review by Bill Jefferies (Permanent Revolution, Jan 2008)

AlterNet

• Mike Davis: How to stop the looming depression without lining fat-cat CEOs’ pockets (November 19, 2008). “We are now at a crash site, and our priority should be to save the victims. Here’s how we do that.”
• Joshua Holland: Recession? Depression? How deep, how far and what can be done? (October 11, 2008). “A survey of what some of the best thinkers [Walden Bello, Robert Pollin, James Galbraith, Dean Baker and Robin Hahnel] believe we’re facing in the coming months and years – and the best ways to prevent complete disaster.”
• Joshua Holland: 12 eye-opening thoughts about the bailout’s defeat (October 1, 2008). “To help readers cut through the media overload, we’ve gathered together a dozen views from smart, alternative thinkers on the bailout, the politics surrounding its defeat and predictions about where the economy, and the government’s actions, might go from here.”

Democracy Now!

• Video, Audio, Text: Naomi Klein on the bailout profiteers and the multi-trillion-dollar crime scene (November 17, 2008). “The more details emerge, the clearer it becomes that Washington’s handling of the Wall Street bailout is not merely incompetent. It is borderline criminal.”

Dollars & Sense

• Fred Moseley: The bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Issue 278, Sept/Oct 2008; online at Internet Archive WayBackMachine). “A look at the Fannie/Freddie bailout exposes the critical fault line – between private profits and public aims – that ran right through the hybrid structure of the mortgage giants.”
• Fred Moseley: How to stop the foreclosures: A review of the Policy Proposals (Issue 277, July/August 2008; online at Internet Archive WayBackMachine). “If current policies do not change, it is estimated that, taken as a whole, up to five million homeowners could lose their homes due to foreclosure over the next few years. Which policies would truly help homeowners at risk?”

Fifth International

• Luke Cooper: The crisis of globalisation (Vol.2, No.7, Autumn 2008). “The meltdown of the financial system and the unprecedented scale of state intervention have shaken the very foundations of the post-1980s world order that came to be known as ‘globalisation’.”
• The Credit Crunch: A Marxist Analysis (League for the Fifth International, 2008, 146 p.). “Charting how the events unfolded, and drawing on Karl Marx’s theory of crisis, Richard Brenner and Michael Pröbsting argue that the credit crunch foreshadows a crisis of globalisation.”

Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!

• Steve Palmer: Goodbye Wall Street (Issue 205, October/November 2008). “Through all this, everyone from ‘economic experts’ to the so-called left keeps assuring us that ‘the real economy’ – apparently something separate from the financial economy – is ‘sound’, ‘in good shape’, ‘doing OK’ etc … But what is this ‘real economy’? There is no capitalist ‘real economy’ without money and credit – without finance. Take away money and there is no capitalism.”
• David Yaffe: Capitalism in crisis (Issue 205, October/November 2008). “An reports on the impact of the financial storm now hitting the British economy.”

Foreign Policy in Focus

• Theme: Confronting the financial crisis. “FPIF offers new solutions to the crisis and innovative alternatives to the now officially defunct ‘Washington Consensus’.”
• Walden Bello: Wall Street meltdown primer (September 26, 2008). “The Wall Street meltdown is not only due to greed and to the lack of government regulation of a hyperactive sector. This collapse stems ultimately from the crisis of overproduction that has plagued global capitalism since the mid-1970s.”

Green Left Review

• John Bellamy Foster: Global economic crisis: ‘No-one knows where the toxic debt is buried’ (Issue 749, 7 May 2008). “Peter Boyle spoke to Bellamy Foster about the development of the current global economic crisis.”

The Guardian

• Feature: Crunch time (September 17 2008). “We’ve heard the bankers’ stories. The economists have had their say. But what do the opponents of capitalism make of the global financial crisis? Is this the moment they have been waiting for? Stephen Moss and Jon Henley ask high-profile leftwingers for their views on the meltdown – and whether any good can come of it.”

Historical Materialism Conference

• Chris Harman: The outbreak of the 2007 crisis (November 2007). Transcript of talk at the Historical Materialism weekend in November 2007.

In Defence of Marxism

• Alan Woods: Panic in world markets (10 October 2008). “Panic has gripped the stock markets of the world. Things are completely out of control, and there is nothing that governments can say or do that can stop it. As in 1929, every time people thought that the worst had come, further falls were just round the corner. Nobody knows how far share prices have still to go. The world economy now finds itself in unsheltered waters.”
• Mick Brooks: Neoliberalism – dead or only sleeping? (9 October 2008). “‘Neoliberalism’, sometimes called ‘market fundamentalism’, i.e. the policy of non-intervention by the state in the economy, has been the dominant ideology of the bourgeoisie for close to three decades, involving widespread privatisation and all the other policies that go with it. The present economic meltdown, however, is forcing governments to intervene, regulate, and even nationalise firms because they have no choice. So is ‘neoliberalism’ dead?”
• Booklet: World capitalism in crisis (September 26, 2008, 17 p.). Contents: Michael Roberts: Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor; Rob Sewell: Capitalism has failed – period and Alan Woods: World capitalism in crisis.

The Indypendent

• Arun Gupta: How to wreck the economy (October 3, 2008). “Everything you ever wanted to know about the biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression but were afraid to ask.”

International Socialism

• Andrew Kliman: A crisis for the centre of the system (Issue 120, Autumn 2008, p.61-76). “The United States is caught up in the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression. This crisis calls into question the stability and indeed the very survival of capitalism. Unlike the savings and loan crisis 20 years ago … the present crisis affects financial markets generally and emanates from the major centre of capitalism. It thus threatens to become a global crisis.”
• Feedback (Issue 119, Summer 2008). “The dynamics of capitalism today are of fundamental concern to the left. Jim Kincaid challenges some of the arguments Chris Harman has put in recent issues of this journal. Harman replies, alongside a further short comment by Fred Moseley.”:
  Jim Kincaid: The world economy – a critical comment (p.145-158)
  Chris Harman: Misreadings and misconceptions (p.159-170)
  Fred Moseley: Some notes on the crunch and the crisis (p.171-172)
• Chris Harman: From the credit crunch to the spectre of global crisis (Issue 118, Spring 2008, p.27-44). “Crunch has become crisis, and many pro-capitalist commentators are panicking. Chris Harman places their dilemmas in the context of serious underlying difficulties for the global system.”
• Jim Wolfreys: Won’t get fooled again? (Issue 118, Spring 2008, p.217-221). Review of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism: “This is one of the most important books of the past decade, although its impact would have been greater had its 600 dense but sometimes repetitive pages been edited more rigorously.”
• Costas Lapavitsas interview: the credit crunch (Issue 117, Winter 2008, p.13-24). “Is last summer’s upset in the money markets turning into a major crisis for the system as a whole? And how significant was the collapse of Northern Rock? Costas Lapavitsas, author of two Marxist accounts of finance, provides an explanation of what is happening.”
• Chris Harman: Theorising neoliberalism (Issue 117, Winter 2008, p.87-121). “Neoliberalism is the term used to describe present day economic policies by both their supporters and their opponents. But, argues Chris Harman, many accounts of it are confusing and give the impression that fighting it is an easy alternative to fighting the capitalist system.”
• Chris Harman: The rate of profit and the world today (Issue 115, Summer 2007, p.141-161). “Few of Marx’s idea have produced as much criticism from subsequent Marxists as his theory of the falling rate of profit. Chris Harman explains the theory and looks at its relevance to capitalism today.”
• Chris Harman: Snapshots of capitalism today and tomorrow (Issue 113, Winter 2007, p.119-137). “Neoliberalism and the drive to war are not accidental features of the world today, insists Chris Harman. Using a series of graphs and tables he shows how they are linked to the present trajectory of capitalism.”
• Alex Callinicos: Making sense of imperialism: a reply to Gindin and Panitch (Issue 110, Spring 2006, p.196-203). “I want to focus in what follows on the two key issues that separate me from Panitch and Gindin: (1) Is the period of economic crisis that developed in the late 1960s over? (2) What form do the relations among capitalist states take today?”
• Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin: Feedback: ‘Imperialism and global political economy’ – a reply to Alex Callinicos (Issue 109, Winter 2006, p.194-199). “This proclivity all too often gives rise to a search for evidence of economic crises on the basis of an overestimation of the political fragmentation and instability that such crises must bring. This tends to be accompanied by a type of politics that is premised on the expectation that economic crises and war among capitalist states will provide the setting for revolutionary opportunities.”
• Alex Callinicos: Imperialism and global political economy (Issue 108, Autumn 2005, p.109-127). “A carefully stated and empirically supported critique of the classical Marxist theory has been developed in recent years by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin. … This article is devoted to assessing this critique and the alternative analysis it seeks to support.”
• Chris Harman: Analysing Imperialism (Issue 99, Summer 2003, p.3-81). “Imperialism has been the word on the lips of millions in the last two war-filled years. But there is disagreement as to what it really means: is waging war only of benefit to the arms manufacturers and the multinationals gaining lucrative contracts? Or does it run deeper than that, to the heart of the logic of capitalism?”
• Chris Harman: The crisis of bourgeois economics (Issue 71, Summer 1996, p.3-56). “Mainstream economics has suffered a double blow in the last 30 years. First the post-war concensus that government intervention could offset recessions, formed around the work of John Maynard Keynes, was blown apart by the resurgent economic crisis of the 1970s. But now the free market dogma which replaced Keynesian economics has proved equally incapable …”

International Socialist Review

• Joel Geier: Capitalism’s worst crisis since the 1930s (Issue 62, November–December 2008). “This crisis will be deeper and more prolonged than previous cyclical crises of recent decades. Geier outlines the origins of the crisis, its ideological and political impact, and how it is changing the contours of the world system.”
• Phil Gasper: Racial scapegoats for the crash (Issue 62, November–December 2008). “Conservatives blame affirmative action for the economic crisis.”
• Lee Sustar: No end in sight (Issue 60, July-August 2008). “Whether or not financial markets recover their nerve, there’s a likelihood of both a downturn in the U.S. economy in the near term and prolonged economic weakness in the eventual recovery. Rather than winding down, the crisis is still in its early stages.”
• Joel Geier: More than a recession: An economic model unravels (Issue 58, March-April 2008). “Joel Geier argues that this recession reflects a crisis of capitalism that goes deeper than the regular boom-bust cycle.”
• Joel Geier: The coming economic meltdown (Issue 57, January-February 2008). “Joel Geier explains why the economic turmoil that has roiled the United States in the past several months is likely to get worse.”
• Joel Geier: Warning signs of a coming recession (Issue 55, September-October 2007). “ISR’s talks to Joel Geier, associate editor of the ISR, about the economic shock waves that have recently rocked the U.S. and the world economy.”

International Viewpoint

• Andy Kilmister: The economic crisis and its effects (Issue 407, December 2008). “The current economic crisis has broken the temporary solutions which have ruled the world economy since the mid-1980s. Profits had been created through production but, in contradiction, were realised through circulation and exchange. British is now exceptionally vulnerable to the crisis.”
• Claudio Katz: A crash course in capitalism (Issue 406, November 2008). “The seism on Wall Street has surprised the world Establishment. At the summits of power, panic and alarmist declarations dominate. Everyone is absorbing an event which could be the beginning of a change of epoch. The comparison with the fall of the Berlin Wall gives some indication of this historical dimension.”
• Francois Sabado: Taking the measure of the crisis (Issue 406, November 2008). “From the beginning of the ‘subprime’ crisis of September 2007, we noted that this banking and financial crisis was the forerunner to a total economic crisis, that marked a historical turning point in the world economy and situation. Today, for all commentators, the historical bench mark for estimating the extent of the crisis is ‘the crisis of 1929’, with differences”¦ but it is of this breadth.”
• Michel Husson: Toxic capitalism (Issue 406, November 2008). “The crisis that we are witnessing today is shaking the very foundations of neo-liberal capitalism. It is unfolding at an accelerating speed, and nobody is capable of saying where it will lead.”
• Francois Chesnais: ‘The climatic crisis will combine with the crisis of the capital”¦’ (Issue 406, November 2008). “The point of view that I will defend is that the crisis which started in August 2007 represented a real break which put an end to a long phase of expansion of the world economy.”
• Charlie Post: Their crisis, our consequences: Is this what 1931 looks like? (Issue 405, October 2008). “Is the banking crisis the end of capitalism as we know it? Put simply, no. Capitalism cannot avoid periodic short-term and long-term crises of falling profits and economic stagnation. However, as Marx pointed out over 150 years ago, capitalism has internal mechanisms – driving down wages, reorganizing work, massive bankruptcies – that allow it to recover from these crises.”
• Andy Kilmister: The world economy and the credit crisis (Issue 401, June 2008). “The current credit crisis is throwing into question the whole of the neoliberal, free market, order that when the post-war boom went into crisis in the mid-1970s, it was eventually resolved in the mid-1980s by a new economic order, neoliberalism.”

Left Busines Observer

• Doug Henwood: Reflections on the current crisis (Issue 116, August 2007) + Part Two (Issue 118, April 2008). “Quite a few weeks the financial markets have had. What’s it all mean? The Internet left is getting all heated up – this is the Big One, the End of the World, the Death Agony of Capitalism. Maybe; that’s always possible. But it’s not likely.”

Marx and the financial crisis of 2008

• David McNally: From financial crisis to world slump: Accumulation, financialization, and the global slowdown (December 15, 2008). “This is an expanded version of a paper presented to the Plenary Session on ‘The Global Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences’ at the 2008 Historical Materialism Conference, held at the University of London, November 8, 2008.”

Marxsite

• Charlie Post: Crisis theory – root causes of the current crisis (Nov 8, 2008). “What follow is a very brief outline presentation of the four main radical and Marxist theories of crisis … After presenting each theory, I will attempt to evaluate them in terms of their political implications, logical structure, and factual/empirical validity.”

Monthly Review

• John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff: Financial implosion and stagnation: Back to the real economy (Vol.60, No.7, December 2008). “Our argument in a nutshell is that both the financial explosion in recent decades and the financial implosion now taking place are to be explained mainly in reference to stagnation tendencies within the underlying economy.”
• William K. Tabb: Four crises of the contemporary world capitalist system (Vol.60, No.5, October 2008). “This essay examines aspects of the global political economy that I hope will inform progressive governments and movements for social change. It evaluates the constraints and opportunities presented in the current conjuncture of world capitalist development.”
• Karl Beitel: The subprime debacle (Vol.60, No.1, May 2008). “How did this crisis come about, and what are its longer-term implications? Are limits being reached in the ability of speculative credit creation … Or is this a mere bump in the road prior to the resumption of a new wave of credit-fueled growth?”
• John Bellamy Foster: The financialization of capital and the crisis (Vol.59, No.11, April 2008). “What we will argue here is that this is not just another massive credit crunch of the kind so familiar in the history of capitalism, but signals a new phase in the development of the contradictions of the system, which we have labeled ‘monopoly-finance capital’.” See also Postscript (MR Online, 25/10/08)
• Minqi Li: An age of transition: The United States, China, Peak Oil, and the demise of Neoliberalism (Vol.59, No.11, April 2008). “As the U.S. housing bubble bursts and the dollar’s dominance over the global financial system becomes increasingly precarious, the U.S. economy is now going into recession and the global capitalist economy is entering into a new period of instability and stagnation. The coming years are likely to see a major realignment of the various global political and economic forces and will set the stage for a new upsurge of the global class struggle.” The article in Norwegian: Klimaendringar, grenser for vekst og den nødvendige sosialismen (Rødt! nr.2, 2009)