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By Mick Brooks
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Thursday, 01 May 2008 |
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The immediate cause of the sliding dollar
is not far to seek. It’s the US
deficit with the rest of the world. Last year the USA imported nearly twice as much
as it exported. Their current account deficit stands at 6% of national income.
If a country is spending more than it’s earning, then it has to pay for the
difference.
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By Michael Roberts
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Thursday, 27 March 2008 |
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Under capitalism if there is no profit, there is no
production even if people need things or services. Therefore, over the last 25
years there has been a massive expansion of the unproductive sectors of the capitalist
economy, i.e. a massive increase in fictitious capital. This is now expressing
itself in what may be the worst crisis for more than 30 years.
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By Mick Brooks
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Monday, 17 March 2008 |
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Last month 100,000 American private sector workers lost their jobs. This is
the third monthly rise in the unemployment figures in a row. Everything
indicates that the USA is now in recession. As it is the biggest
single market in the world, this will inevitably have a big impact on the
rest of the world.
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By Mick Brooks
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Monday, 17 March 2008 |
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Last Thursday it
was Carlyle Capital Corporation. On Friday it was the turn of Bear Stearns, the
fifth largest bank in the USA.
The American Central Bank, the Fed, is due to meet this week to talk about
interest rates. Most likely they will cut them again. The trouble is, the more
they slash rates the more people can smell the fear.
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By Mick Brooks
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Monday, 17 March 2008 |
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Republication of the article is timely. In 2007 the sub-prime mortgage
bubble finally burst. The financial crisis has already had a knock-on effect on
the banks through the credit crunch. The capitalist world stands on the
threshold of recession.
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By Ed Doveton
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Wednesday, 13 February 2008 |
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In 2006 the
world's richest two percent of adults owned more than half the global wealth,
while half the world's population own only one percent. In 2007 the World
Wealth Report estimated the total wealth of rich individuals at $37.2 trillion!
While this wealth accumulates for a small minority, the vast majority of
humanity is seeing its living standards plummet. In these figures we see
another picture: the growing tensions between the classes that will lead to
social upheaval and revolution on an unprecedented scale.
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By Alan Woods
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Monday, 28 January 2008 |
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The second part of the transcript of Alan Woods' speech on the world political and economic
perspectives for year 2008 at a meeting of the leadership of the
International Marxist Tendency on January 13, 2008. You can also listen to the speech here.
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By Alan Woods
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Friday, 25 January 2008 |
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Transcript of Alan Woods' speech on the world political and economic
perspectives for year 2008 at a meeting of the leadership of the
International Marxist Tendency on January 13, 2008. You can also listen to the speech here.
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By Mick Brooks
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Wednesday, 23 January 2008 |
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Everything now clearly indicates that the
advanced capitalist world is headed for recession. The only question is when
and how deep that recession will be. In fact Merrill Lynch says the US economy
is already in recession. And that’s bad news for all of us. Here Mick Brooks at
what is really going on in the world economy.
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By Mick Brooks
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Wednesday, 23 January 2008 |
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We have seen the sharpest falls in stock markets around the
world for almost a decade. Billions have been wiped off share prices worldwide.
As we have predicted, fear mounted among the financial authorities that the
panic could lead to a full-blown recession.
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By Michael Roberts
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Tuesday, 22 January 2008 |
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Panic! The world's stock markets had their sharpest fall
since 9/11 on Monday 21 January. It is supposed to be the most miserable day in
the year in the Northern hemisphere, where the daylight is short, the weather
is bad, people have colds and flu and they have run up debts from Christmas. But
this year, it really was a Black Monday for capitalism.
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By Alan Woods
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Monday, 07 January 2008 |
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As the New Year begins Alan Woods comments on the state of world
affairs, highlighting the impasse facing humanity, a direct consequence of
capitalism in its phase of senile decay. At the root of the present world
turmoil is private property of the means of production, a system based on greed
for profit. In the next period the workers of the world are faced with the task
of removing the system.
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By Michael Roberts
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Wednesday, 28 November 2007 |
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Everywhere
the cry is: credit crunch! You can smell the sweat on the brows of bankers as
their necks are squeezed by the tightening credit noose. In all the offices of
the great investment banks of Wall Street, the City of London and gnomes of
Zurich, you can hear the hissing sound of the global financial bubble bursting
and deflating.
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By Michael Roberts
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Thursday, 15 November 2007 |
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According
to a recent United Nations study, the richest 1% of adults in the world own 40%
of the planet's wealth. Europe, the US and some Asia Pacific nations
accounted for most of the extremely wealthy. More than one-third lives in the US, while Japan
accounts for 27%, the UK for
6% and France
for 5%. But bourgeois economists still insist Marx was wrong!
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By Alan Woods
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Wednesday, 26 September 2007 |
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The bourgeois economists are incapable of understanding
crises, which are an inescapable result of capitalism. They look for subjective
factors such as “confidence”, even “human nature”. In reality what we are
witnessing are the real workings of the capitalist system in a period of
decline.
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By Alan Woods
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Tuesday, 25 September 2007 |
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The recent chaos on world stock markets is a
manifestation of the general turbulence that is the most prominent feature of
the present epoch. The crisis that affected the Northern Rock bank in Britain
is but an indication of dramatic
events that are being prepared globally.
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By Michael Roberts
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Wednesday, 19 September 2007 |
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Over the past 15 years
production has risen at about 3% a year in the OECD countries, while money
supply, mortgage and company debt, personal borrowing and the massive so-called
derivatives market based on this credit has increased at over 25% a year!
Result? A huge bubble which is now bursting, starting with Northern Rock.
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By Michael Roberts
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Monday, 27 August 2007 |
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Recently, the Bank of England hiked its interest rates yet
again to 5.75%,the fifth rise since August 2005, and "further action" on
interest rates could be on its way. The interest rate may go to 6% or more by
the end of this year. The credit-led boom is now in jeopardy as central banks
raise interest rates everywhere.
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By Mick Brooks
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Wednesday, 15 August 2007 |
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The financial turbulence of recent days has
wiped billions off the price of shares all around the world. On Friday August
10th London’s stock exchange, the FTSE 100, alone dropped £63
billion. What does this mean?
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By Alan Woods
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Monday, 13 August 2007 |
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This speech was delivered at a meeting of
the leadership of the International Marxist Tendency in Barcelona on 24 July
2007. The recent turbulence on world stock markets fully confirms the
perspectives outlined in it.
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By Michael Roberts
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Wednesday, 08 August 2007 |
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The
poorest 50% of the world's 6.6bn population own just 1% of the world's riches.
The answer? "Although we Americans strive to provide equality of economic
opportunity, we do not guarantee equality of economic outcomes, nor should
we." (Ben Bernanke, the chair of the US Federal Reserve)
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By Michael Roberts
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Thursday, 19 July 2007 |
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This is an important book, written by Andrew Kliman, and published by
Lexington Books. In a nutshell, what Andrew Kliman shows is that Marx's laws of
motion of capitalism (how capitalism works and does not work) are logically
consistent and theoretically valid.
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By Juan Ignacio Ramos
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Friday, 25 May 2007 |
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High levels of growth have been achieved in the
world economy, but these have been based on huge levels of easy credit, on
debt. This is not sustainable in the long run. Figures on the state of the US
economy indicate that the system is reaching its limits and crisis is looming.
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By Michael Roberts
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Wednesday, 14 March 2007 |
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The nerves of stock market speculators can’t be in too good
a shape these days. Wall Street has just suffered its second biggest point drop
in four years. This immediately spread to Asian stocks markets that suffered
serious falls.
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By Michael Roberts
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Thursday, 01 March 2007 |
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China
hints at a tax on capital gains and the Shanghai
stock exchange falls by 10%, but then the fall affects all the other major
stock exchanges. What does all this indicate? Michael Roberts gives his view on
the question.
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By Chris Kaihatsu
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Thursday, 25 January 2007 |
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A reader has objected to some of Michael
Roberts’ criticisms of Andrew Glyn’s latest book. Among others it deals with
the question of whether profit rates in the post-war period were affected by
wage increases. Roberts replies showing that the fundamental reason for the
decline was the same as that stated by Marx.
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By Michael Roberts
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Friday, 05 January 2007 |
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In his new book, Capitalism
Unleashed, Andrew Glyn attempts to explain how capitalism moved from the
crisis of the 1970s to recovery in the 1980s and 1990s. However, although full
of interesting information, the book fails to provide an overall analysis and
misses some essential aspects of Marxist theory.
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By Michael Roberts
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Friday, 24 November 2006 |
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Milton Friedman died on 16 November aged 94
years. He was one of the foremost bourgeois economists of the 20th
century. His reputation as a monetarist theoretician and advisor to the likes
of Thatcher, Reagan and Pinochet as these attacked all the gains of the working
class was well earned.
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By Michael Roberts
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Monday, 13 November 2006 |
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The
financial press and the investment houses of global finance capital are in
euphoria. The world's stock markets are booming. But a closer look reveals that
all this euphoria is misleading and the real situation is far less healthy than
would appear on the surface.
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By Michael Roberts
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Friday, 27 October 2006 |
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The
Financial Times recently claimed the British economy has been doing
rather well out of globalisation. A closer look at the figures shows that what
we have before us a growing polarisation, with the rich getting richer and the
poor poorer. On a world scale the position is even worse, which may possibly
explain the growing instability all across the globe.
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By Michael Roberts
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Wednesday, 24 May 2006 |
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Capitalism cannot provide
a decent living to everyone, but as long as it guarantees significant
layers of the population a reasonable standard of living it can
maintain a degree of social stability. Recent figures on the
situation in the USA show that “middle America” is beginning to
feel the pinch, a phenomenon which indicates that social turmoil will
soon be on the agenda.
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By Michael Roberts
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Monday, 27 February 2006 |
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One of the key elements in holding up consumer spending – and therefore sales and profits – in the USA has been growing house prices. The growing nominal value of housing has led to a widespread phenomenon of remortgaging, i.e. borrowing more to keep up annual family incomes. This cannot continue for much longer. The signs are already there that we are close to the limit. |
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By Michael Roberts
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Friday, 10 February 2006 |
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Capitalism in the advanced capitalist countries is becoming ever more based on finances and services. The idea is that the actual production of real goods can be done in less developed countries where labour costs are much cheaper. For this to work, the consumer boom in the West must be maintained permanently, otherwise who will buy the goods? Can this be maintained in the long run? |
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By Michael Roberts
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Wednesday, 12 October 2005 |
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After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have
ravaged the US coast of the Gulf of Mexico, does the fast-rising oil price presage a worldwide economic
recession? The track record of oil shocks is indeed close to perfect. In the
case of the US, each of the previous three oil shocks was followed by recession.
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By Michael Roberts
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Wednesday, 07 September 2005 |
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Official figures
reveal that US corporate profits as share of GDP have moved up from lows in
2001 to reach near record levels in 2005. But if you look over the much longer
term, US profits are still below the levels achieved in the 'golden years' of
capitalism back in the 1960s. The steady decline of the ability of capitalists
to extract profits from their workforces is revealed even more clearly when we
look at the profit figures before tax. |
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By Mick Brooks
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Friday, 26 August 2005 |
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The criticism of Marx’s approach essentially boils down to the complaint that he is not an equilibrium economist. This criticism is quite correct. Marx has a fundamentally different method from neoclassical or post-Ricardian economists – dialectical economics. |
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By Mick Brooks
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Thursday, 25 August 2005 |
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When Meghnad Desai comes to discuss this aspect of Marx’s work, this is the area where his ‘equilibrium’ interpretation of Marx’s economics leads him most seriously astray. He seems to imply that Marx can be used to defend the idea of the long-term survival of capitalism, which is something alien to Marx. It is also an oversimplification of what Marx said. |
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By Mick Brooks
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Wednesday, 24 August 2005 |
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The socialist calculation debate is usually regarded as beginning in 1920 with a challenge to the socialists thrown down by the right wing Austrian economist von Mises. He opined that rational economic calculation would be impossible in a socialist commonwealth. Unfortunately, the socialists who took up this challenge did not, with the sole exception of Maurice Dobb of the British Communist Party, regard themselves as Marxists. |
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By Mick Brooks
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Wednesday, 17 August 2005 |
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Marxist economics answers the question ‘how did the many start poor?’ with an analysis of primitive accumulation, the historical process of the dispossession of the toilers from the means of production and creation of a propertyless working class. We then go on to explain capitalist production as the production not just of commodities, but also of rich and poor. Reproduction is the reproduction not just of factories and offices, but of the capitalists who own them and the workers who labour in them. |
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By Mick Brooks
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Monday, 15 August 2005 |
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Bourgeois economics uses as a central tool of analysis the concept of equilibrium – of capitalism in a state of rest. We regard Marxism as essentially based on the economy in a constant state of motion and therefore in permanent disequilibrium – or rather a condition where the notion of equilibrium has no meaning. |
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By Mick Brooks
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Thursday, 11 August 2005 |
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Economists, with outstanding exceptions such as Marx, have usually set out to glorify capitalism. They tend to conclude that it will automatically produce full employment and increasing prosperity – so long as nobody messes about with its workings. That is the outlook of monetarism. But Marxists believe that Keynesianism doesn’t work either. It doesn’t work because capitalism can’t be made to work. The problem of capitalism in crisis is not just a matter of inadequate demand - of markets - it’s a problem of profitable markets. |
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By Mick Brooks
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Tuesday, 09 August 2005 |
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Marxists believe that the principle contradiction of the capitalist system is between the increasingly social nature of production it opens up and develops, and the retention of private appropriation. This is a very general proposition, which will be enlarged on and explained throughout this article. |
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By Mick Brooks
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Friday, 05 August 2005 |
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Meghnad Desai has published a book, Marx’s Revenge in which he poses a fundamental question for Marxists – could capitalism go on for ever? The short answer to this is that capitalism will last until such time as it is overthrown through socialist revolution, conscious action by millions of people. So the question needs to be reformulated: is socialism on the agenda? If capitalism is a flawed system, as we argue, then it will offer endless opportunities for its overthrow. Desai, on the other hand, seems to argue that a crisis-free future is possible for capitalism. Talk of socialism is therefore premature. Mick Brooks argues the case for socialism in the twenty-first century.
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By Michael Roberts
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Wednesday, 15 June 2005 |
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The world economy is being sustained by US consumer spending and
Chinese manufacturing. US consumer spending is based on the illusion of
growing property values, but these cannot keep going up forever. The
property bubble in the US will burst and when it does it will have
devastating effects on the whole of the world economy. |
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By Phil Mitchinson
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Wednesday, 08 June 2005 |
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House price increases are slowing down in Britain. In June in London
prices actually fell. This is the beginning of the end of the house
price bubble and it will be very painful for many families who have
borrowed on the basis of the increased equity in their property. It
will have a knock-on effect on the whole economy as spending is already
slowing. |
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By Workers' International League
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Wednesday, 08 June 2005 |
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Over the past couple of years the U.S. economy has gained some momentum
and avoided slipping back into recession, but this was based on the
increased squeezing of the U.S. and world working class, not job growth
or significant investment in productive capacity. Even if the U.S.
economy miraculously takes off in the second half of 2005, the damage
has already been done for millions of working Americans. |
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By Michael Roberts
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Sunday, 05 June 2005 |
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Behind all the optimistic talk about the health of world capitalism
from Bush, Blair etc, the more serious analysts are worried. In its
semi-annual report, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development announced that it is cutting its forecasts for all leading
economies. It may not happen this year, but the huge imbalance in the
world economy is going to crack. |
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By Mick Brooks
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Wednesday, 18 May 2005 |
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In the 1980s there was a debate within the Marxist tendency about
productive and unproductive labour. Here we provide a contribution to
that debate by Mick Brooks. Although this is archive material, we
believe it will help today’s generation to better understand capitalism
in order to overthrow it. |
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By Michael Roberts
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Thursday, 20 January 2005 |
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As the Chinese bureaucracy pushes the economy of China more and more along the capitalist road, more contradictions are appearing. The more the economy is integrated into the world market the more it will be prone to all the ups and downs of world capitalism. A serious slowdown on a world scale will have devastating effects. |
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By Rob Sewell
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Thursday, 16 December 2004 |
 In
1916 in the midst of the First World War Lenin produced a Marxist
masterpiece, entitled “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”.
With US imperialism extending its domination over the whole of the
world, this book is more relevant than ever. Eighty years after Lenin’s
death we publish an appraisal of this classic work. |
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By In Defence of Marxism
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Monday, 13 December 2004 |
Who produces the wealth and who gains most from its production? In a
pamphlet written 97 years ago, John Wheatley described an imaginary
court case, with a coalmaster, a landowner and several others being
charged with “having conspired together and robbed an old miner, Dick
McGonnagle." Its basic class analysis remains valid for workers today
as they are still being robbed. |
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By Mick Brooks
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Thursday, 02 December 2004 |
Henry Ford had a mythical reputation as a “people's capitalist”, a man
who was smart enough to design a car that ordinary workers could
afford, and a boss who paid his workers enough to buy Ford cars.
Nothing could be further from the truth! The great lesson of labour
relations at Ford's from its beginning is that every improvement for
the workers was gained through bitter and unremitting struggle. By Mick
Brooks |
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By Michael Roberts
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Monday, 29 November 2004 |
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Paying particular attention to the US, European and Chinese economies,
Michael Roberts analyses the real state of the world economy. As we
head into the Christmas season, things are not looking so merry for
world capitalism. |
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