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By Mick Brooks
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Wednesday, 23 January 2008 |
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 Mick Brooks
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Tuesday, 22 January 2008 |
The government is
desperate not to nationalise Northern Rock. As Trotsky says, “the banks concentrate in their hands the actual control over
the economy.” If the banks are
always to be bailed out because they are so important to the economy, then we
need to take them all over.
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By Mick Brooks
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Thursday, 17 January 2008 |
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This article was originally written on the occasion of the seventieth
anniversary of the 1929 Wall
Street Crash. It was not intended purely as a
commemorative or historical piece. It was written because, to Marxists, all the
signs were then apparent that another stock price ‘correction’ was in
preparation.
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 Michael Roberts
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Wednesday, 02 January 2008 |
Andrew Glyn died from a brain tumour on 22 December 2007. He was 64 years old. A fellow of Corpus Christi College
in Oxford since
1969, he was a leading socialist economist for all that time.
Andrew left a wealth
of important writing that analysed the development of post-war capitalism. His best-known works were British capitalism, workers and the profits
squeeze with Bob Sutcliffe in 1972; Capitalism
since 1945 with Phil Armstrong and the late John Harrison in 1984 and most
recently, Capitalism Unleashed
(2006), reviewed earlier.
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By Michael Roberts
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Wednesday, 28 November 2007 |
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 Mick Brooks
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Monday, 26 November 2007 |
The final part of this extended article on Marx's theory of crisis focuses on the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, with reference to the generalised world-wide crash of 1974. The tendency for the rate of profit to fall manifests itself in practice through the development of internal contradictions, as part of a cycle and not, as over-production
theorists would have it, as a crash coming out of a clear blue sky.
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By Mick Brooks
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Thursday, 22 November 2007 |
The second part of this extended article on the Marxist theory of Crisis looks at world
capitalism since the Second World War. It deals with Glyn and the profit rate, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the increasing organic composition of capital.
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By Mick Brooks
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Monday, 19 November 2007 |
Marx's theory of crisis has been the source of controversy for more than
a century. Many competing schools have been set up, basing themselves on
isolated quotes. This is partly because Marx's key observations are
scattered through his economic writings. This extended article looks
first at the different theories that try to explain capitalist crisis
and at how Marx's own theory of crisis fits in with his broader view of
capitalist development. The next part will apply this analysis to world
capitalism since the Second World War.
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By Alan Woods
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Monday, 01 October 2007 |
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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Wednesday, 26 September 2007 |
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 |
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 Mick Brooks and Dan Morley
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Tuesday, 04 September 2007 |
The collapse of Metronet , the consortium entrusted with upgrading the
tube, spells the collapse of the whole notion of 'Public Private
Partnership', otherwise known as the Private Finance Initiative.
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By Mick Brooks
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Tuesday, 14 August 2007 |
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? The same firms are still employing the same workers and
making the same things. But these firms are suddenly worth £63 billion less
than twenty-four hours before. And this should sound alarm bells for their
workers - and for the rest of us.
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By Michael Roberts
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Tuesday, 24 July 2007 |
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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