Three years of the deepest economic crisis since the 1930s, and no end in sight. The following piece gives a sketch of where things are at. Eddy Laing is the author of the three-part Costs of Empire (to be found here, here, and here on this site), as well as the essay Why Historical Materialism [...]
Posts under ‘Political Economy’
What could the end of capitalism look like?
We’ve had some interesting and important discussions on this site (see, recently, the comments on the Henwood piece and on the interview with Albo, Gindin, and Panitch) which have sometimes referenced fictitious capital and have often come back to three very large questions: the character and cause of the neoliberal period of the past 30 [...]
Financialisation, empire, crisis: how to get out?
The following interview is with the three authors of In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives, a recently published short book on the economic crisis by Greg Albo, Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch. The book has its virtues and its vices, almost evenly divided between its analysis and its prescription. [...]
Why the push for austerity?
This piece poses the following problem: In the face of the worst recession of the post-WW2 period, a recession whose effects were mitigated only through unprecedentedly massive government bailouts and stimulus, at a time when there is a danger of the recession’s becoming “double-dip” and prospects for long-term economic growth are far from robust, the [...]
No new deal!
I’ve started to think that there are some analogies between Negri and Zizek: a similar prolificality of work, and what I’ve begun to see as a similar playfulness (although Negri suffers in this comparison, Zizek being both more prolific and funnier). Be that as it may, this little piece begins playfully enough, but leads into [...]
The crisis, financialization, and “cognitive capitalism”
Christian Marazzi, whose recent book on the economic crisis is reviewed below, is one of those (like Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and others) who takes the theoretical legacy of the Italian autonomist struggles of the 1960s as a starting point. Often subsumed under the terms post-Fordist or post-workerist, the theory posits a new capitalist structural [...]
What is Marx’s theory of crisis?
Marx is much invoked in left discussions of the current economic crisis. But what does Marx say about capitalist crises? His authority has been invoked in relation to rather different theories, and what he says on the subject in Capital has subject to multiple interpretations as well as controversy. The following exposition by Cyrus Bina [...]
America in decline?
It is a common view that the great growth of financialization, the growth of financial capital in relation to total capital (particularly US capital), has been a sign of decay and weakness of the US and of US imperialism. (Something close to this view is to be found in the essays by Foster and Holleman [...]
Headed into long-term drift?
The following piece is posted in relation to our discussions on the economic crisis at the suggestion of Nick Paretsky, who notes that Balakrishnan “advances the argument that capitalism is in a ‘secular crisis‘, although it’s different from Don H.’s secular crisis theory.” This article originally appeared in New Left Review 59, Sept-Oct 2009. Speculations [...]
Financial capital in command
In the following piece, reprinted from the current Monthly Review, Foster and Holleman work from what might be called the Monthly Review theory of present-day capitalism, centering on the notion that capitalism persistently tends toward stagnation, leading to a need for stimulus, provided in the recent era by the “financialization of the capital accumulation process.” [...]
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