Michael Roberts, ecomics editor of Socialist Appeal, explains the immediate causes of the present crash of the markets: the currency crisis in South East Asia and how these economies, which were supposed to be models of capitalist development suddenly collapsed.

It has become fashionable among contemporary bourgeois historians and sociologists to belittle the role of the working class by claiming that it has been diminished in size and influence. Some even venture as far as declaring that the working class no longer exists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mick Brooks answered these points in an article that was originally published in November 1996 in the British Socialist Appeal.