On 4 August a massive explosion shook Beirut port when a neglected storehouse of ammonium nitrate blew up, catapulting Lebanon onto the front pages of the global media. The volatile chemical was being stored next to the country’s main grain… Continue Reading
Around 2.7 billion workers worldwide have been affected by full or partial lockdown measures to combat the coronavirus pandemic—around 81 percent of the world’s 3.3 billion workforce. The world economy has seen nothing like this. Nearly all economic forecasts for… Continue Reading
Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake. Walter Benjamin, 1940, Notes for “On… 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
The tenth anniversary of the collapse of the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2018 has attracted enormous coverage.1 The focus has less been on the actual event itself—indeed Albert Edwards of Société Générale argues that its… 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
It is now six years since the first rumblings of the earthquake that was the global financial crash and the Great Recession. On 9 August 2007 BNP Paribas announced that it was closing down two of its funds of US… Continue Reading
The global capitalist crisis has now reached its half-decade point, and the months leading up to this unhappy anniversary saw the publication of a number of interesting papers on Marxist political economy. Here I will briefly survey some of them,… Continue Reading
Throughout the crisis sensationalist claims have emerged on both the right and the left that the crisis would lead to a catastrophic and immediate rise in joblessness or, conversely, that it is really not that bad. This article examines exactly… Continue Reading