In the previous issue of International Socialism there was an interesting and balanced review by Dave Sewell of Michael Roberts’s book The Long Depression in which Roberts argues that the global economy remains in the throes of a long depression.… Continue Reading
A review of Ben Fine, Microeconomics: A Critical Companion Pluto Press (2016), £17.50 and Ben Fine and Ourania Dimakou Macroeconomics: A Critical Companion Pluto Press (2016), £17.50 Writing in the mid-19th century, British historian Thomas Carlyle described economics as the… Continue Reading
A review of Michael Roberts, The Long Depression, Haymarket (2016), £14.99 Can the man who predicted the start of the economic crisis say how it will end? That’s the bold ambition of Michael Roberts’s book The Long Depression. It combines… Continue Reading
A review of Pavel V Maksakovsky, The Capitalist Cycle (Brill, Historical Materialism book series, 2004), Euro 59 There was a flourishing of Marxist intellectual life in the Russia of the mid-1920s that was wiped out with the final triumph of… Continue Reading
A review of Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (Oxford University Press, 2016), £35.99 Anwar Shaikh is one of the world’s leading economists who draws on Karl Marx and the classical economists (“political economy”, if you like). He has taught… Continue Reading
A review of Morten Jerven, Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong (Zed Books, 2015), £14.99 Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong provides a critical review of the recent economic history of Africa. Morton Jerven argues that, for most of the… Continue Reading
The year 2016 started pretty badly for global capitalism. In the first couple of weeks of January global share prices fell sharply—at one point they were 20 percent below the high they reached last year. Subsequently markets regained a degree… Continue Reading
The major global crises of the mid-1970s and 2008-9 provoked debates among the ruling class about the best economic policies to manage capitalism. For socialists and activists the question was different, and debates about whether and to what extent capitalism… Continue Reading
In my last article for International Socialism 18 months ago I argued that the Great Recession of 2008-9 that devastated the world capitalist economy had not been followed by a recovery in investment and output in the “normal” way, as… Continue Reading
A review of Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (Verso, 2013), £20 In the substantial body of Marxist literature emerging in the wake of the economic crisis that began in 2007-8, two broad positions have been… Continue Reading