Socialist Appeal
The British section of the International Marxist Tendency
The digital currency Bitcoin has hit the headlines in recent times for its novelty, as well as for its phenomenal rise in price over the past few years. Ben Gliniecki looks at the hype and reality of the Bitcoin sensation.
What is value? This question has perplexed the human mind for more than 2,000 years. The classical bourgeois economists grappled with the question, as did Marx. Rob Sewell looks at Marx's Labour Theory of Value and provides a defence of these economic ideas against attacks from modern day critics.
To celebrate the centenary of Ted Grant, founder of the Militant Tendency and Socialist Appeal, we are re-publishing Ted's article entitled "Will There Be a Slump?". Written in 1960 in the middle of the post-war boom, when many others on the Left had accepted Keynesian economic ideas, Ted explained the fundamental causes behind the boom and how these would eventually lead to crisis. For more information on this topic, come along to the Marxist Summer School, where Adam Booth will be speaking on the subject.
The following article was originally published in the summer issue of our theoretical magazine In Defence of Marxism. In a previous article from the IDOM magazine, we polemicised against the theory of “under-consumption” as an explanation of capitalist crisis. In this article, we wish to look at Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and explore the wider question of how to approach economics in a dialectical manner.
There is a tendency amongst the leaders of the labour movement to draw a distinction between the ‘parasitic’, ‘irresponsible’ financial sector of the economy and ‘productive’, ‘responsible’ manufacturing. But is it useful to draw this distinction between financial and industrial capitalism? In this history of finance capital, Luke Wilson discusses how such a distinction is artificial: the growth of industrial capitalism was intimately bound up with the growth of finance capital.