Books on capitalist economic crisis

[Lyev]

Does anyone know of any books from a leftist/Marxist perspective on the economic failures of capitalism? Basically I see the whole shindig as over-accumulation: there's a glut in the market and because there's an increase in demand, then commodities deprecate in value because demand vastly outweighs supply. But how does this mean that the "the people" (ie. the majority of the population) suffer the most?

Anyway, specifically books focusing on the topics of:

1) a run-down of the current crisis; perhaps relating it back the wall street crash in the 30s
2) the free-market model as advocated by Ronald Reagan and Margerat Thatcher
3) and possibly the Asian tiger economies

Maybe some stuff also about how illogical capitalism in general is, how unstable it is, and how such things effect the workers at the bottom of the pile.


Thanks everyone
__________________________________________________ __

EDIT:
here's a list of all the books or sources mentioned thus far:

The Current Crisis
The Great Financial Crisis - Foster and Magdoff
Zombie Capitalism - Chris Harman
The Persistent Fall in Profitability Underlying the Current Crisis - Andrew Kliman
The Violence of Financial Capitalism - Christian Marazzi
Fred Magdoff and Michael D. Yates - ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know
From financial crisis to world slump: accumulation, financialization, and the global slowdown - David McNally


Crisis Theory in General
Limits to Capital - David Harvey
An Introduction to the History of Crisis Theories - Anwar Shaikh
Explaining the Crisis - Chris Harman
The Economics of Global Turbulence - Robert Brenner

The History of Capitalism
Adam Smith in Beijing - Giovanni Arrighi
The Boom and the Bubble - Robert Brenner

Here is also a 30 minute radio broadcast explaining the current US financial crisis: A Chronology of Capitalism

And also brendanmcooney from Youtube has some pretty good stuff on it, from a distinctly Marxist perspective;

+ YouTube Video

+ YouTube Video

[ZeroNowhere]

Andrew Kliman's done some awesome work on the current crisis. He's done quite a lot of talks and interviews on the current crisis, which you can find here. The talks often go over the same subjects (eg. the bailout (repudiating the bollocks that is all too common among leftists regarding its purpose), the reason for the crisis, etc). The interviews do the same things, and may be useful for the purpose of clarifying his points. They also go over strategic suggestions and such.

However, his best and longest work on the crisis is 'The Persistent Fall in Profitability Underlying the Current Crisis', which is a 106 page pdf which goes into far more detail than the talks, also containing more evidence and so on (the raw data is given in a separate spreadsheet, though graphs and such are shown in the pdf, so it's not really necessary to look at the spreadsheet). Basically, the crisis originates from the failure of the system to recover from the 1970s, due to the fact that rather than there being enough destruction of capital values, as there was with the combination of the Great Depression and WWII back in the day, the system was simply kept alive through excessive debt and hence only with bubbles which eventually burst. Ultimately, then, one of the major causes was the much-neglected tendency of the rate of profit to fall (incidentally, while he goes to some extent into repudiating the Okishio theorem, 'internal inconsistency' arguments and so on here, that's mainly done in his book, 'Reclaiming Marx's Capital', which I would say is worth getting if you wish to know about the origin of arguments about the falling rate of profit and the 'transformation problem'). This also provides a pretty strong argument against capitalism, in that these crises are just going to continue recurring until there is sufficient destruction of capital values (the last time required the Great Depression and WWII, so...), or the economy collapses due to loans freezing and leads to chaos, fascism and such (which is very unlikely, especially given measures such as the bailouts), or a socialist society is established.

As for the regulation and non-regulation thing, he thinks that as the free-market is pretty much suffering the same problems as Keynesianism did in the '70s, it's quite likely that the economy will end up more regulated by the end of the crisis, though this won't be able to prevent further crises, and nor will it necessitate welfare programs, contrary to certain leftists' expectations.

Something else worth reading is Anwar Shaikh's introduction to the history of crisis theories, available here. It's not specifically on the current crisis (he's probably put out some things on the current crisis, which I should probably check out), but it does go over crisis theory as such (Marx's, as well as underconsumptionism and so on), and has a pretty nice explanation of the falling rate of profit theory that should help with the Kliman paper.

[Lyev]

Thank you Zero. How connected/related are privatization and capitalist crises? Is "Privatization: An Economic Analysis" by John Vickers and George Yarrow recommendable at all? Here it is: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Privatizatio...2907159&sr=1-1

[ZeroNowhere]

I have not read it. However, according to Kliman, privatization is not a cause of crises, and I would agree with this.

Well, bubbles and the bursting of these bubbles are recurrent features of capitalism-not just “extreme” capitalism, but capitalism as such. The main immediate cause of the crisis was of course the bursting of the bubble in the housing sector in the US, the sharp drop in home prices. Since the end of the postwar boom in the mid-1970s, in particular, a massive amount of debt has been created in order to prop up spending artificially and thereby alleviate some of the effects of the relative slump. But the explosion of debt has led again and again to bubbles-for instance, to the “dot com” stock market bubble of a decade ago-and then to the inevitable bursting of the bubbles. Increasing debt faster than the new value that’s actually generated in production is just not a sustainable way to “grow the economy” in the long run.

The subtext of the phrase “extreme capitalism” is that regulated capitalism will supposedly be more successful than free-market capitalism. But consider the savings and loan (building society) crisis in the US of two decades ago. Thousands of S&Ls collapsed, and the government eventually had to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to make good on depositors’ losses. This crisis was a failure precisely of regulated capitalism. The S&Ls were very heavily regulated; both the interest rates that the S&Ls paid depositors and the rates they charged on mortgage loans were fixed by the government. But when inflation took off in the mid- and late-1970s-and note that regulation and Keynesian policies were unable to prevent this spiralling inflation-interest rates outside the depository system shot up. This caused depositors to flee the S&Ls, and so the S&Ls were forced to bring in funds by paying higher interest rates than the rates they were getting on their mortgage loans. That meant that they were continually losing money. So Congress was then forced to loosen the regulations, in part by letting the S&Ls charge higher rates for loans. But to get interest rates high enough to keep them solvent, they had to make riskier and riskier loans. A lot of these loans never paid off, and in the end the industry essentially collapsed.

The basic problem with the notion that regulated capitalism is somehow better than free-market capitalism is the simple fact that, in the end, capitalism can’t be regulated. This was acknowledged recently by Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Laureate and former World Bank chief economist. In mid-September, he wrote an article that proposed a whole slew of new regulations and laws. But he ended by conceding, “These reforms will not guarantee that we will not have another crisis. The ingenuity of those in the financial markets is impressive. Eventually, they will figure out how to circumvent whatever regulations are imposed.” I think this is exactly right.

Stiglitz did go on to say, “But these reforms will make another crisis of this kind less likely, and, should it occur, make it less severe than it otherwise would be.” That doesn’t make sense, however. If the financial markets will eventually circumvent whatever regulations are imposed, then, once they do, the next financial crisis will be just as likely and just as severe as it would have been otherwise. The best that can be said for new laws and regulations is that they can delay the next crisis, while the markets in the process of finding ways to circumvent the regulators. And a delay of the crisis means more artificial expansion through excessive borrowing in the meantime, so that the contraction will be more severe when the bubble does finally burst.

If you mean, on the other hand, whether crises can cause privatization then the answer is yes. For example, the crisis of the 70s discredited Keynesianism, and regulation and government policies can serve to both absorb losses and reduce aggregate losses losses. A good post on that is here. Also, the bailout and such are important to prevent loans from freezing up.

The purpose of all of these interventions is instead to try to save capitalism, the system itself, not the wealth of the wealthy. The US Treasury, the Fed, and other governments are bailing out the financial sector, not because they care about enriching the rich, but because a collapse of financial institutions that are “too big to fail” could well trigger such panic as to cause lending to stop, bringing the financial sector-and with it, the “real” economy-crashing down. They have been crystal-clear about this throughout the crisis. I suspect that when they let Lehman Brothers, a big Wall Street firm, go under in mid-September, we were seeing the start of such a panic, and that this is why the authorities then rushed in, in emergency fashion. In the next several days, the US government bought AIG, the big insurance firm, it announced a system-wide $700 billion bailout, and so forth.

There's also some discussion of the connection here.

[kalu]

I'm reading David Harvey's Limits to Capital right now, and I think he does a phenomenal job of explaining the current economic crisis (pretty impressive, considering he was writing in 1982). It's a bit of a trudge-through though, not exactly light reading. He's pretty clear though at summarizing and attempting to resolve certain disputes both inside and outside Marxism (ie "the transformation problem," "overaccumulation or underconsumption"?) and if nothing else you might read the book to get your bearings on Marxist debates you're interested in studying further. Finally, though he is pretty deterministic (serious lack of discussion of the impact of ie workers' struggles and how that informs "the logic of capital"), he's very open to conceiving capitalism in an "open" manner, rather than presenting rigid laws that guide historical development.

If you want to learn more about the state of Asian economies, I've heard good things about Giovanni Arrighi's Adam Smith in Beijing, but I haven't read his work. Andre Gunder Frank (famous Latin American "underdevelopment" theorist) has also put out some work on that subject, too...(ReORIENT)

[Lyev]

Thanks for the replies. Please could you go over this "bursting bubble" concept a bit more clearly?

And it's strange, because I always thought nationalized industries were always a lot more stable than privatized ones.

[ROBOTROT]

There is a short and accessable book by the Monthly Review people using their theory of of 'Monopoly Capitalism' to explain the current crisis. It's called The Great Financial Crisis, by Foster and Magdoff.

Another book, which I haven't yet read but intend to, is Zombie Capitalism by Chris Harman. His explanation rests on Marx's 'tendency for the rate of profit to fall'. He also wrote a pretty good book called Explaining the Crisis nearly 30 years ago which discussed the great depression and the crisis of capitalism in the 1970s from this point of view.

The other obvious choice (apart from David Harvey who is mentioned by someone else and who also wrote the worthwhile A Brief History of Neoliberalism) is Robert Brenner who wrote The Boom and the Bubble, which is an economic history of the USA since the 2nd world war up until the turn of the 21st century and The Economics of Global Turbulence which I haven't read but understand is a more theoretical work.

[The Idler]

There ought to be a decent sticky topic on this.

[which doctor]

Christian Marazzi's The Violence of Financial Capitalism was recently released and deals specifically with the recent economic crash. Marazzi is a strange variety of marxist, and belongs to the current of post-autonomism and is also keen on the concept of 'semiocapitalism' and that labor has taken on a linguistic form. He also deals heavily with the disparity between the finance economy and the real economy. It's a short book, and probably one of the better ones dealing with the current economic crisis. Its not the best book, or the easiest to understand, since the nature of the financial economy is largely a mystery to most of us, but worth reading.

[Yazman]

There ought to be a decent sticky topic on this.

There will be if we can gather enough sources together

[Lyev]

There will be if we can gather enough sources together

Shall I start listing these sources at the top of the thread? Like the books are listed for beginners in the sticky in Learning?

[The Idler]

Shall I start listing these sources at the top of the thread? Like the books are listed for beginners in the sticky in Learning?

Like I said in this topic, sticky topics throughout revleft need centralising and planning.

[Yazman]

Shall I start listing these sources at the top of the thread? Like the books are listed for beginners in the sticky in Learning?

Good idea. Keep listing them at the top of the thread and I will put them in the in-depth reading sticky as a new section.

[bailey_187]

ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working people need to know by Fred Magdoff and someone else whos name i forgot

Basically Paul Sweezy's theories on Monopoly Capitalism applied to the present crisis in easy to read language. Good book.

[Hit The North]

Chris Harman's last book, before his untimely death late last year, Zombie Capitalism.



http://www.amazon.co.uk/Zombie-Capit...5310352&sr=8-2

[Lyev]

I updated the opening post to include that radio broadcast giving a succinct overview of the recent crisis, that August posted a while ago in Learning (thanks August!). And I also added two videos by brendanmcooney from Youtube, explaining crises in terms of the antagonism between the forces of production and the relations of production. Hope the sources have proved useful.

[Communist]

"Low Wage Capitalism" by Fred Goldstein is a great read. It was written directly before the 2008 disaster, but it is discussed in the introduction and certainly shows how it got to that point.
The book is available as a free PDF here.

[bailey_187]

http://monthlyreview.org/100201foster.php

There's a new article by John Foster on Finance-Monopoly Capital in the Monthley Review. I'm waiting for my hard copy to arrive in the post so aint read it yet, but im thinking that it will cover the crisis/crisis theory more generally.

Expro, if you dont read Monthly Review magazine, i suggest you do, they regularly have very good articles on economics

[svenne]

Maybe the articles from Aufheben about Decadence could fit here?`It´s a couple of years ago i read it last time, but as far as i remember there is some good introductory stuff about what several different leftist ideologies think about capitalism and crisis.
Can be found here, anyway: http://libcom.org/library/decadence-aufheben-2

I have also heard very good things about David Harveys Limits to capital, but haven´t read it myself - yet.

There also was a very good and short introductionary for noobs article in our (as in anarcho-syndicalist youth federations) magazine Direkt Aktion (Direct Action), but i don´t think it´s been translated. Maybe i´ll do it, if i get enough time on my hands. (it´s a really great article, really).

[Wolf Larson]

This crisis is no different than the others. Unplanned overproduction of products the working class cannot afford. Simple version. Save yourself the money. Now you don't have to buy the book.