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
A new edition of Capitalism and Theory (Haymarket, 2018) has made a selection of writings by Michael Kidron available to a new audience in print for the first time in decades. Kidron was a founder and important early theorist of… Continue Reading
Chris Harman died suddenly on the night of 6-7 November 2009, on the eve of his 67th birthday. He had been serving his third stint as editor of International Socialism. I took over editing this journal after Chris’s death. Ten… Continue Reading
A review of Geoff Mann, In The Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution (Verso, 2019), £14.99 Geoff Mann’s (sympathetic) critique of John Maynard Keynes—“the most influential economist of the 20th Century”—is worth reading for two… Continue Reading
A review of Oliver Nachtwey, Germany’s Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe (Verso, 2018), £16.99 Oliver Nachtwey’s book sets out to examine the truth of the central ideological myths of the German economy. First, that Germany is… Continue Reading
A review of Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (Penguin, 2019), £12.99 I won’t say kowtow…but at least be nice to the countries that lend you money—Gao Xiqing, Head of the Chinese Sovereign Wealth… Continue Reading
It is now a full decade since the financial turmoil that heralded the beginning of the “long depression”.1 On a global scale, the recession that developed in the wake of the collapse of the Wall Street bank Lehman Brothers in… Continue Reading