A review of Capitalism in the 21st Century: Through the Prism of Value, Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts (Pluto, 2022), £19.99 Any new book by Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts is to be welcomed; both authors have had a long… Continue Reading
Editor’s introduction I was going to open by writing that Michael Kidron (1930-2003) is best known as a Marxist economist, a leading theoretician of the International Socialist (IS) tradition and the foremost developer of the theory of the permanent arms… Continue Reading
A widely anticipated recession across the major economies had not taken hold by the time International Socialism went to press, but there was no doubt that the global economy was coming under intense strain.1 The post-Covid rebound in economic activity… Continue Reading
What are the prospects for left politics as 2023 begins?1 To say that the coming year will be one of crisis is simply to state the obvious, a point now accepted across the political spectrum and echoing through end of… Continue Reading
Liz Truss, asked to form a new government in what turned out to be the dying act of Queen Elizabeth II, confronts one of the greatest crises for an incoming British prime minister with one of the weakest mandates.1 Truss… Continue Reading
Production is the essential condition for any functioning human society, and collective human labour the foundation of production.1 These basic facts are typically buried under an overgrowth of ideology but the Covid-19 pandemic has helped to strip this back, placing… Continue Reading
A review of The Debt System: A History of Sovereign Debts and their Repudiation, Éric Toussaint (Haymarket, 2019), £14.99 Even before the global shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the World Bank was warning that a new international debt crisis… Continue Reading
Marxist political economy has a two-fold interest in the economics of defence.1 On the one hand, Marxism has proposed explanations for the extent and scope of defence spending in contemporary capitalism, drawing on theories of imperialism.2 On the other hand,… Continue Reading
A review of Grace Blakeley, Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation Grace Blakeley (Repeater, 2017), £10.99. Stolen is a very comprehensive and readable account of the roots of financialisation in the 1970s crisis, which ended the “golden age”… Continue Reading
It is tempting to see pandemics as unpredictable, cataclysmic incursions of nature into human society.1 Yet the outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) is anything but a “natural” phenomenon. Epidemics and pandemics happen in a social, political and economic context,… Continue Reading