The objective roots are essentially the sharp rise of unemployment in the imperialist countries from 10 million to at least 50 million, if not more. The official statistics are all government statistics, and they're all fake. In the third world countries, at least 500 million are unemployed. For the first time since the end of World War II, unemployment is rising in the bureaucratised post-capitalist societies too.
The subjective roots lie essentially in the total failure of organised labour and mass movements to resist the capitalist offensive. In many countries these organisations have even spearheaded it: France, Italy, Spain and Venezuela, just to name a few. This has undoubtedly made resistance to the capitalist offensive more difficult.
Read moreWall Street stands in for a system – as its alpha male – that is inherently inequitable, but also unstable and crisis-prone. We have seen this story repeated over and over again, in which profits are privatized, while losses are socialized. The tab is eventually picked by the taxpayers. This is how wealth gets redistributed from the poor to the rich. No wonder that the top .01% (14,000) families in the U.S. now own 22.2% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 90% (around 133 million) families, a mere 4%. We haven't seen such numbers in nearly a century.
Read moreThe so-called financial crisis today is a symptom. The underlying disease is capitalism: an economic system that weaves implacable and destructive conflict into its production and distribution of goods and services. Employers and employees need to cooperate to make the economy work, but they are forever adversaries whose conflicts periodically burst into crises. So it is today. Capitalism also locks employers into those endless struggles with and against one another that we call competition. It too periodically erupts into conflicts and crises. And so it is today.
Read moreThe first problem is the financial turbulence that has gripped the economy of the United States and has had widespread effects. It is a crisis that further discredits mainstream Anglo-American economics. I do not know that it is the crisis of capitalism. For this to be the case it would not only have to become much deeper, but its impacts would have to be felt more dramatically as a systemic failure. Most importantly, a party formation capable of explaining how such crises are inherent in the nature of the functioning of capitalism and of inspiring a socialist alternative would have to mobilize a movement of the sort that ended apartheid in South Africa. Without the last, even a deep and painful crisis will be, at best, only the occasion for reforming and not abolishing capitalism.
Read moreJust like our Wall Street heroes of the recent past, so, too, back in the 1920s the savants of the Street claimed credit for the rickety prosperity of the Jazz Age. With the Crash they took the blame for the disaster, just as they had taken the credit for the prosperity, and were despised for their hypocrisy as well. Just as seems to be starting to happen today, Congressmen, some of whom had spent their careers genuflecting before the titans of Wall Street, suddenly hauled them before investigating committees, there to be defrocked, treated to a withering storm of biblically-inspired injunctions and Shakespearean curses, and indicted in the court of public opinion. Wall Street was, as it now seems about to be again, excommunicated.
Read moreIt's the illusion that the state somehow stands apart from capitalism, is not part of capitalism; it stands outside of it. It's all this misunderstanding when we speak of states versus markets. These markets are full of power, asymmetric power, very unequal power, and those power is founded on the backing that states give them. The free markets that we know have been made by very active state intervention, and people enter into market activities knowing that states will back up property in those markets. So it's an illusion to think that states are something other than capitalism. When you understand American capitalism, you understand the state is part of it. Federal Reserve and Wall Street, right, need to be seen as part of a whole—sure, in which the Federal Reserve is not acting as a competitor inside the market; it's acting as an overseer of it; more or less regulation in different periods, it's true, but it's an overseer of it.
Read moreThe stimulus should be designed to quickly boost demand. In the United States, this can best be done by aiding state and local governments, extending unemployment benefits, tax rebates to low income individuals, accelerating infrastructure spending and support for energy conserving retrofits of homes and businesses. It is also essential that the dollar fall against other major currencies in order to bring the trade deficit back to a manageable level.
Read moreWe are once again up against that real barrier. Hence the issue of regulation/deregulation/reregulation is, at this point, immaterial -- at least if one is talking about new restraints on capital as a solution to the immediate problem. Restabilization of capitalism requires what has always been the saving function of crises: a vast amount of existing capital must be extinguished to enable a smaller surviving amount to begin again the process of blind, crazed accumulation. But the real-world suffering that would accompany such a massive "devaluation of capital" -- the lost jobs, housing, self-respect, and the misery, even starvation, which would follow on a global scale today -- would mean the end of the U.S. model of capitalism, since the rest of the world would never accept such a result. What we need and must fight for is real regime change: that is a socialism for the 21st century.
Read moreBeginning with Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979, government after government -- and party after party -- fell to the onslaught of an extremist faith: the narrow, blinkered fundamentalism of the "Chicago School." Epitomized by its patron saint, Milton Friedman, the rigid doctrine held that an unregulated market would always "correct" itself, because its workings are based on entirely rational and quantifiable principles. This was of course an absurdly reductive and savagely ignorant view of history, money and human nature; but because it flattered the rich and powerful, offering an "intellectual" justification for rapacious greed and ever-widening economic and social inequality, it was adopted as holy writ by the elite and promulgated as public policy.
Read moreHere are some of the reasons why people fail to prevent ecological collapse. Their resources appear at first to be inexhaustible; a long-term trend of depletion is concealed by short-term fluctuations; small numbers of powerful people advance their interests by damaging those of everyone else; short-term profits trump long-term survival. The same, in all cases, can be said of the collapse of financial systems. Is this how human beings are destined to behave? If we cannot act until stocks - of either kind - start sliding towards oblivion, we’re knackered.
Read moreIn terms of the hegemonic cycles, the United States was a rising contender for hegemony as of 1873, achieved full hegemonic dominance in 1945, and has been slowly declining since the 1970s. George W. Bush's follies have transformed a slow decline into a precipitate one. And as of now, we are past any semblance of U.S. hegemony. We have entered, as normally happens, a multipolar world. The United States remains a strong power, perhaps still the strongest, but it will continue to decline relative to other powers in the decades to come. There is not much that anyone can do to change this.
Read moreWe've been suckered, cajoled, manipulated and coerced into joining them in their world of delusion, ensnared as bit players in the grievous overproduction of imaginary wealth. And while the realm of the fictitious expanded infinitely, the realm of our real lives contracted and shrank. Our wages flatlined or fell; we lived in fear of acquiring an uninsured health problem; our mortgages turned into a leaden ball and chain. The loans and debts multiplied and the interest rates kept rising. One administration after the other enabled a regime of trickle up profits and trickle down pain.
Read morePerhaps we need a Marxian to sort out the world's financial woes. The insights of Karl Marx on capitalist crises, especially speculation and financial crises, were sophisticated for his time. Indeed, this nineteenth century communist revolutionary called financial assets and loans 'fictitious capital' or 'imaginary wealth' as distinct from 'real capital' - industrial or productive capital - such as factories and commodity stocks.
Read moreThe finance capitalists have the ear of policy-makers. For example, the World Trade Organisation is pressing ahead with measures to make it more difficult to regulate derivative markets.
Private finances fund much state activity. There is no real talk of governments using the banks that they have effectively nationalised to support job creation, fund infrastructure such as rail and the renewable energy that we need for ecological sustainability.
Read moreI don’t think most Americans understand just how much trouble the country is in. We are backing ourselves into a corner. Our debt-laden economy is highly sensitive to increases in long-term interest rates, and those since 2003 have become largely determined by foreign capital inflows from central banks, sovereign wealth funds, and other official (as opposed to private) sources. If a significant geopolitical shift away from financial support of the U.S. takes place–due to, say, military conflict between U.S. creditors, or perhaps due to rising economic and financial crisis at home–the source of those inflows may quickly dry up. One reasonable estimate I read forecasts a 2 percent increase in the ten-year Treasury bond per year that inflows stop and holdings merely remain constant. That will tend to increase mortgage rates and slow the U.S. housing market and economy further.
Read moreBig events revive these debates, but they need to be reinvented for new times. Conventional sociological post-industrialism accounts rendering left ideologies and movements redundant badly need revision in the light of falling living standards and growing inequalities. So does Fukuyama's notion of the end of ideology and the triumph of market capitalism - as he now admits. Big names too: Keynes, Polanyi, Kondratieff, Galbraith and now Paul Krugman are deployed by social democrats against those who want to resurrect Marx and Engels.
Read moreWhatever might have been possible, politically speaking, in the eighteenth century had people been obliged to share more equally, it was still a time when genuine crop failures could take place; trade was expensive and sometimes the necessities of life were in short supply. Here I shall argue that today, for the first time in human history, poverty retains not a shred of mystery nor of inevitability; one need no longer ask if, technologically and materially speaking, it could be eradicated. The answer is simple and straightforward: yes, it could . Politically, however, as I shall also argue, the European Union, with the complicity of its Member States, is doing whatever lies in its considerable power to prevent this happening both in Europe itself and in the world. This will be the second focus of my contribution.
Read moreThe global financial system is unravelling at great speed. This is happening in the midst of a multiplicity of crises in relation to food, climate and energy. It severely weakens the power of the US and the EU, and the global institutions they dominate, particularly the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. Not only is the legitimacy of the neo-liberal paradigm in question, but the very future of capitalism itself.
Read moreChinese factory managers have cut their orders for raw materials. The Baltic Exchange Dry index has plummeted. Currencies climb up and down, but the stock exchange indices look like the altimeter of an aircraft in freefall. Stock markets across the planet look to the Central Banks of Euro-Land and the U. S. for some guidance, and then shy away, taking cover under the flimsy shields of their own governments. The Sovereign Funds of the Gulf States prefer to park their substantial petro-dollars into their own infant stock exchanges, since they have already burned their fingers in New York and London.
Read moreNeither the colossal state interventionism seen over the last few weeks to rescue institutions dismembered and drained dry by speculation, nor massive public indebtedness are plausible ways to get out of the crisis. The existing dynamic encourages new rounds of capital concentration and, if the peoples do not firmly oppose this, it is becoming perilously likely that restructuring will occur simply to save privileged sectors. This could mean there is a danger of capitalism returning to an authoritarian way of functioning, since in the North an increase in discrimination and racism towards immigrants from countries in the South has already been noted – which is something extremely regressive.
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