“The workers... battle-cry must be: 'The Permanent Revolution.'” — Marx and Engels, 1850
Sat 30, January 2010 @ 10:07
The US economy grew by 5.7% in the final quarter of 2009. For the whole of 2009 it declined by -2.4%, while 7 million US workers have lost their jobs through the course of the crisis, it appears the Great Recession is over for now. Bill Jefferies considers the prospects for recovery.
Thu 17, December 2009 @ 11:03
A book on the current economic crisis that contains the sentence, “we simply do not know what is going to happen, or how deep or critical the recession might be, or how long-lasting the effects of the global financial crash will be” is not at first sight going to make you want to read it for any insights into the global recession.
Wed 25, November 2009 @ 10:19
Way back in March Peter Taaffe, the General Secretary of the Socialist Party, wrote;
Sun 15, November 2009 @ 11:59
Chris Harman’s Zombie Capitalism offers an analysis of capitalist crises, argues Graham Balmer which, combines useful background material with a dogmatic refusal to trace the roots of the current crisis back to a period of strong economic growth...writes Graham Balmer
Fri 16, October 2009 @ 09:39
The SWPs International Socialism Journal (ISJ) claim that capitalism is stagnant and has been for nearly four decades now. Throughout the period of globalisation they say, capitalism has seen declining production and investment, overcapacity and low, stagnant or falling profit rates. The digital age, internet revolution and Nintendo Wii Fit are all manifestations of capital’s inability to revolutionise the productive resources. The latest ISJ 124 features articles by Andrew Kliman and Joseph Choonara, re-treading this well worn road….writes Bill Jefferies…
Fri 28, August 2009 @ 17:51
UK bosses predict that the recession which began in the summer of 2008 and which has included the deepest drop in output since the early 1980s is over....writes Bill Jefferies...
Fri 03, July 2009 @ 21:24
In ISJ 123 Joseph Choonara provides a round up of the various Marxist explanations of the current crisis, critiquing them from what has become the orthodoxy of the ISJ tradition...writes Bill Jefferies....
Wed 10, June 2009 @ 17:01
For four months between October 2008 and February 2009 capitalism collapsed. As credit froze with Lehmans failure on September 15th 2008 trade, output, orders and investment halted, in January 2009 US unemployment increased by 740,000 in a month, over five million US jobs have disappeared through the course of the recession the highest since the 1950s...writes Bill Jefferies...
Wed 27, May 2009 @ 09:08
Over the last five years Permanent Revolution have explained how globalisation represented a new upward long wave of capitalist development. The defeats of the working class in the imperialist heartlands, notably the USA and UK combined with the restoration of capitalism in the former Stalinist states between 1989-1995 enabled world capitalism to escape the stagnation that had characterised it between 1973-1989...writes Bill Jefferies...
Thu 21, May 2009 @ 21:02
The recession in the UK economy is well underway and deepening. Export orders have collapsed as the credit crunch has stripped away trade financing. The most recent unemployment figures showed that nearly two million were looking for work at the end of last year – the unemployment rate was 6.3%, its highest since 1997.
Fri 24, April 2009 @ 16:50
The UK economy slumped in the first quarter of 2009, in the biggest contraction since the rise of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. GDP fell 1.9% after declining 1.6% in the previous quarter.[1] Particularly vulnerable to the crisis of the world’s financial system, the UK, with the greatest dependency on financial investments of any nation in the world, has seen the revenues of its banks and finance houses slump, while at the same time desperately trying to recapitalise its banks against their current losses.....writes Bill Jefferies....
Mon 20, April 2009 @ 18:00
Paul Mason has followed his successful first book, Live Working or Die Fighting, with a new one about the banking collapse. It is, says Keith Harvey, a lively account and useful analysis of the road to disaster...Mason is something of an exception in broadcast journalism. As BBC2’s Newsnight’s economics editor he succeeded Evan Davies and Stephanie Flanders (now the BBC’s economic editor) to the job, after a few years as the programme’s business editor.
Fri 27, March 2009 @ 16:29
The failure of Lehman Brothers on September 15th posed the total collapse of the US financial and capitalist system. The capitalists survived that through nationalising large parts of the financial system and throwing $12 trillion dollars at the problem in the US alone. But even then they couldn’t avoid the downswing. This article considers trends in the rate of profit, how they relate to the current crisis and shows that it remains above all a crisis of the financial sector....writes Bill Jefferies...
Mon 16, March 2009 @ 10:13
Your significant theoretical contribution to the left and therefore your purpose for being has been your serious economic research resulting in support for the long wave theory of economic cycles. In particular your location of Chinese economic development within this cycle....However in hindsight it can be seen that in 2005 the long boom had peaked. After that what followed was a speculative orgy based on residential and non-residential property which swept outwards from the USA to engulf every country including China....writes Brian Green....
Sat 28, February 2009 @ 12:22
A minimum requirement for the ending of the credit crunch is an end to the US housing price slump which is shredding the banks balance sheets. But this is some way off.
Sat 28, February 2009 @ 12:20
A notable feature of the recent crisis in the major imperialist nations has been the impact of changes in raw materials prices (or commodities). Marx explained in Capital that changes in raw materials prices will have a direct and disproportionate impact on the rate of profit. Other conditions being equal, the rate of profit, therefore, falls and rises inversely to the price of raw material. (Marx, Capital Volume 3, Chapter 6)
Sat 28, February 2009 @ 12:19
Banks are at the heart of the financial crisis. For two decades they demanded and got deregulation and “light touch” supervision. This allowed them to minimise their capital reserves and invent risky new financial products in the search for greater profits. But their actions destabilised the whole financial system and plunged the major economies into recession.
Sat 28, February 2009 @ 12:17
The US economic analyst Nouriel Roubini nicknamed “Dr Doom” for his pessimistic, foresighted and funny analyses of the US financial catastrophe, correctly called the peak of the housing market and accurately foresaw the scale of the sub-prime debacle. He suggests that the US is headed for its worst post-war recession, and certainly as bad as 1974-75 or 1982.
Sat 28, February 2009 @ 12:14
Rapid economic expansion in Asia from the late 1990s created a
vast pool of surplus capital that western banks used to massively
expand debt and inflate the housing market.
Keith Harvey examines how neo-liberal deregulation of the financial
sector turned a boom into a bubble and finally a crash...
Wed 28, January 2009 @ 16:18
Bill Dunn in ISJ 121 “Myths of globalisation and the new economy”, is the latest ISJ writer to attempt to explain away the myths or rather the reality of globalisation....writes Bill Jefferies....
Fri 23, January 2009 @ 15:49
The government's number crunchers have confirmed what we have known for a while- the UK economy is in recession. Keith Harvey explains why Gordon Brown's continued attachment to neo-liberal dogma means he cannot take the steps needed to stop the recession getting worse
Thu 22, January 2009 @ 22:09
John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff’s article “Financial Implosion and Stagnation”, explains the credit crunch from the under consumptionist viewpoint of the Monthly Review/Sweezy school of Maoism-Marxism....writes Bill Jefferies....
Fri 02, January 2009 @ 15:08
David McNally is a Canadian academic Marxist from the Cliffite state capitalist tradition. His article “From Financial Crisis to World Slump: Accumulation, Financialization, and the Global Slowdown”, is an attempt to provide an overview of the trends in global capitalism since the 1980s, which have lead to the present financial crisis and world recession....writes Bill Jefferies...
Sat 20, December 2008 @ 14:24
These are a number of links to financial indicators, which provide a guide to the depth of the credit crunch.
Wed 03, December 2008 @ 17:15
Over a year has elapsed since the “credit crunch” first hit the headlines. Now as the locus of the economic fallout shifts from the US to Europe, and with the UK particularly vulnerable to recession, Graham Turner, a left-leaning Keynesian economist, has produced a timely summary of the crisis. It is not likely to be the last.
Tue 02, December 2008 @ 17:53
This special issue of the League for the Fifth International’s (LFI) journal consists of a collection of articles on the unfolding credit crunch written over the last year or so, an article on Marx’s theory of capitalist crisis, one on the relevance of Lenin’s theory of imperialism and a polemic aimed at this magazine, attacking its analysis of the credit crunch and its view of the extended period of capitalist growth since the early 1990s.
Tue 02, December 2008 @ 17:50
Fri 28, November 2008 @ 11:38
Robert Brenner’s “The Economics of Global Turbulence” is the pre-eminent text amongst contemporary Leftist economics commentators. It is the inspiration and provides the empirical foundation (in as much as that can be said to exist) for the stagnation theories, which dominate the left today...writes Bill Jefferies....
Sun 23, November 2008 @ 17:06
The UK economy is poised for its first recession since the early 1990s. A perfect storm of rising inflation on the back of high commodity prices, a collapsing housing market and battered financial sector have combined to darken the skies. How bad will it get ask Bill Jefferies and Keith Harvey (For the PDF of this article click here)
Fri 10, October 2008 @ 14:38
After 7 successive days (upto Thursday 9th October) of decline Wall Street stock indices have tumbled by 21 % to their lowest levels since 9/11 in the largest sustained fall since 1937 - not quite yet then the worst crash since 1929 - but getting there....writes Bill Jefferies...
Fri 10, October 2008 @ 12:53
The markets won’t be persuaded. Speculative mania gave way to a crash and now panic has set in. What comes next, asks Keith Harvey
Tue 30, September 2008 @ 10:30
The failure of the US Congress to pass the Emergency Economic
Stabilization Act of 2008 has brought the crisis of the western
financial markets into a new and more dangerous phase, says
KeithHarvey
Fri 26, September 2008 @ 12:45
As Washington's financial and political leaders haggle over the terms of a system-wide bail-out of the banks, Keith Harvey says the stakes are high but that a socialist and revolutionary solution offers the most realistic way out of the present chaos
Mon 22, September 2008 @ 10:29
It is open season in the media on Wall St financiers and the failings of capitalism. The vices of the free market are now been underscored daily. But it is going a bit far to call these measures "socialist" as some are doing, says Keith Harvey...
Thu 18, September 2008 @ 11:30
Does the current crisis of the financial markets presage a “new paradigm” of the whole capitalist system? This is a topic of debate fast emerging in online and print discussions as the most recent turmoil claims more titans of the US and British banking industry, says Keith Harvey
Tue 09, September 2008 @ 14:50
Over the weekend of September 6/7th the US Treasury engineered
the takeover of two mortgage giants to reassure markets and
forestall a collapse of the whole financial system. Bill Jefferies
looks at what led up to and what the implications are likely to
be...
Mon 04, August 2008 @ 19:02
According to the Economist, the American capitalists seem to have dodged recession for now:
“The American economy has often defied predictions of its demise. It has done so again. Official figures published on Thursday July 31st show that America’s GDP rose at an annualised rate of 1.9% in the second quarter.....writes Bill Jefferies
Sat 05, July 2008 @ 21:52
In ISJ 119 Chris Harman repeats the notion that capitalism
is stagnant, with falling output and investment – stuck in a mire
of low profitability. This view has been subject to increasing
criticism – so at odds is it with the recent history of world
capitalism....writes Bill Jefferies...
Fri 20, June 2008 @ 18:22
Stagflation - stagnation and inflation - is back in the news. The Bank of England have written to Alistair Darling to explain why they’ve breached their 3% inflation target. Naughty, naughty...writes Bill Jefferies...
Tue 27, May 2008 @ 22:36
Sun 25, May 2008 @ 14:52
From the Weekly Worker
Hillel Ticktin bases his prognosis on fundamental categories such as value, money and capital. The system faces a crisis deeper than anything seen since 1929
Mon 19, May 2008 @ 18:18
Bill Jefferies outlines why he thinks China and Russia were vital to what he sees as capitalism’s expansion...part transcript of a recent debate with Hillel Ticktin of Critique, originally published in the Weekly Worker by the CPGB.
What are the potential ramifications of the credit crunch? Does it represent a financial bubble, a possible recession in the USA or even a great depression - the greatest crisis that capitalism has faced in decades?
Fri 09, May 2008 @ 21:46
In the second part of our review of Chris Harman's recent article in ISJ 118, Bill Jefferies looks in more detail at Harman's argument that the credit crunch has arisen out of a "savings-investment gap"....
Sun 04, May 2008 @ 17:29
Chris Harman of the SWP writing in the latest issue of International Socialism (ISJ 118) attempts to unearth the roots of the current credit crunch that started in August 2007 with the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US. In a time of such financial turmoil and a probable recession in the US, what does this tell us about the state of global capitalism today?...writes Graham Balmer...
Sun 04, May 2008 @ 13:47
Bill Jefferies remembers the Wall Street crash of 1929, which plunged the world economy into recession, and punctured capitalism’s dreams of an endless golden future
Thu 01, May 2008 @ 16:00
Mon 28, April 2008 @ 18:09
John Bellamy Foster is the foremost proponent of a Marxist theory of crisis known as under-consumptionism. In the April 2008 issue of Monthly Review, Bellamy Foster reviews the present sub-prime crisis and subsequent credit crunch in order to vindicate this theory....writes Bill Jefferies....
Thu 17, April 2008 @ 17:58
This article is re-printed from the Weekly Worker
Tue 01, April 2008 @ 19:30
Thu 20, March 2008 @ 21:32
Wed 19, March 2008 @ 23:24
Mon 03, March 2008 @ 19:46
Sun 02, March 2008 @ 17:56
Wed 20, February 2008 @ 21:31
Fri 25, January 2008 @ 19:07
Sun 20, January 2008 @ 11:59
Fri 04, January 2008 @ 20:01
Tue 18, December 2007 @ 21:10
Mon 10, December 2007 @ 22:39
Fri 07, December 2007 @ 17:50
Wed 05, December 2007 @ 22:38
PR have asserted that capitalist globalisation has enabled a restoration of profit rates towards their levels at the peak of the 1960s boom.
This article by the noted Marxist economist Fred Moseley, assesses the state of the US economy and the current sub-prime crisis and notes that "It appears that this all-out campaign by capitalists to increase the rate of profit in all these ways has been fairly successful in achieving this objective. It has taken a long time, but the rate of profit is now approaching the previous peaks achieved in the 1960s..."
Sun 25, November 2007 @ 16:23
Andrew Kliman, is an Marxist economist and leading proponent of the Temporal Single System Initative (TSSI), an interpretation of Marx’s economic writings, which seeks to refute charges that Marx’s value theory was inconsistent....writes Bill Jefferies....
Fri 23, November 2007 @ 18:27
Thu 08, November 2007 @ 19:06
Fri 02, November 2007 @ 18:12
Fri 02, November 2007 @ 18:05
Mon 15, October 2007 @ 00:41
Mon 08, October 2007 @ 18:33
A distorted picture of British and global capitalism
Chris Harman of the SWP has written extensively on economic issues for three decades. In International Socialism Journal 113 (winter 2006), he attempts to provide evidence for the notion that world capitalism is stagnant. Here Bill Jefferies disputes his analysis.
Mon 01, October 2007 @ 18:05
Thu 13, September 2007 @ 17:48
Thu 30, August 2007 @ 17:39
Mon 13, August 2007 @ 11:08
Sun 05, August 2007 @ 13:50
Articles about the development of China and its impact on the world economy.
China: Will it change the world? - PR2
Over the last twenty years capitalism has utterly transformed China; in the next twenty Chinese capitalism looks like transforming the world. Keith Harvey looks at the recent history and future prospects of China’s economy.
China and Socialism – Market Reforms and Class Struggle - Review
China and Socialism is a review from two Marxists of the Monthly Review magazine, writes Bill Jefferies... which attempts to trace the development of China from the centralised planning of the Maoist era, through a series of market reforms, to the burgeoning capitalist state of today.
China: A bubble about to burst?
The growth of China is the most elemental proof that the world economy has escaped the stagnation, which gripped it during the 1970s/80s. But many remain in denial, they point to the alleged “over accumulation of capital”, to assert that China is about to explode...writes Bill Jefferies...
Wages, Profits and Productivity
Globalisation since 1990 has seen income inequality reach record levels, a general rise in rates of profit, a sharp increase in productivity and generally rising living standards across the world...writes Bill Jefferies...
China – capitalism on the march
On certain sections of the left (those sections still in denial about the collapse of Stalinism) there is a desire to pretend that China remains in some form a “socialist state” or “workers state” or “centrally planned economy”, writes Bill Jefferies....
The major house journals of capitalism are full of articles about the 'Chinese miracle', its industrial might and sustained growth rates. Frank Kellerman looks at the aims of the new Chinese leadership and the problems they face.
Sat 04, August 2007 @ 13:37
Fri 27, July 2007 @ 18:15
Sat 21, July 2007 @ 13:02
Wed 18, July 2007 @ 13:28
Fri 13, July 2007 @ 21:54
Thu 12, July 2007 @ 21:56
Mon 02, July 2007 @ 19:30
Fri 01, June 2007 @ 14:42
Fri 01, June 2007 @ 14:16
Mon 21, May 2007 @ 18:11
Tue 08, May 2007 @ 19:26
Fri 20, April 2007 @ 18:53
Fri 20, April 2007 @ 18:36
Wed 11, April 2007 @ 19:07
Wed 04, April 2007 @ 13:38
This short paper discusses how to work out the rate of profit, using figures from the US government's Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Any comments are welcome....writes Bill Jefferies...
Marx called the rate of profit, s/c+v, the most important law in political economy;
“The rate of self-expansion of capitalism, or the rate of profit, being the goal of capitalist production, its fall…appears as a threat to the capitalist production process.”
Wed 14, March 2007 @ 19:08
Sun 04, March 2007 @ 17:45
Sat 17, February 2007 @ 22:07
Thu 08, February 2007 @ 18:11
David Yaffe is the foremost theoretician the best known leader of the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG), better known by the name of their paper “Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!” (FRFI)....writes Bill Jefferies...
Fri 02, February 2007 @ 17:47
Fri 26, January 2007 @ 18:09
Fri 12, January 2007 @ 20:18
Fri 12, January 2007 @ 18:19
Thu 14, December 2006 @ 12:06
Mon 11, December 2006 @ 17:27
Sat 09, December 2006 @ 18:17
Tue 28, November 2006 @ 17:16
Fri 24, November 2006 @ 17:20
Wed 18, October 2006 @ 13:38
Mon 04, September 2006 @ 22:19
GDP constant dollar measures
To adjust the GDP figures for the restoration of capitalism it is necessary to delete any measure for these economies before 1990 and then add the total value of the output of these states in that year. If we do this but then do not include the addition of the GDP of the former workers states in 1990 then our figures mirror those of the World Bank....writes Bill Jefferies...
Mon 04, September 2006 @ 20:06
The restoration of capitalism and the growth of the world market.
The restoration of capitalism in 1990 across the former planned economies of the USSR, China and Central and Eastern Europe expanded the capitalist system across a third of the world’s surface and population, fundamentally altered the prospects for the world economy and created the new phase of imperialism generally known as globalisation.
But there remains a conundrum. Any consideration of the statistics produced by the major agencies which monitor the world economy, the World Bank, IMF, OECD, UNCTAD Economist Intelligence Unit etc. describes a very different picture, with the 1990s shown not as a decade of capitalist growth and advance but of retreat and stagnation....writes Bill Jefferies...
Thu 27, July 2006 @ 23:04
Mon 24, July 2006 @ 18:50
At the 2000 Congress of the LRCI...writes Bill Jefferies... we reviewed the evidence of the economic developments of the 1990s and stated that:
"The LRCI accepts the conception of "the curve of capitalist development" as it was fundamentally developed by Trotsky in his analysis in the Comintern in the early 1920s."
(LRCI 2000 Congress Perspectives)
Wed 19, July 2006 @ 00:54
By Keith H
This article summarises Lenin's understanding of imperialism, based on his 1916 pamphlet. It reveals the structures and trends he considered were prevalent in the years 1895-1913, the opening phase of the imperialist epoch, but which were also indicative of the epoch as a whole.
Wed 19, July 2006 @ 00:46
By Keith H
In the current debate over the trends in the world economy two polarised positions have emerged. The IS/IEC/Congress documents argue that since the turn of the century capitalism has exhausted its potential. While the business cycle remains in force and hence upward swings possible, these take place against the "background of stagnation".
Wed 19, July 2006 @ 00:33
By Michael P (For the L5I)
In the past few months I have criticised Bill's documents which claimed that the LFI's analysis is catastrophist and that it has failed to recognise that the capitalist world economy is in a long upswing period since 1992. Despite all his mistakes one can not fail to recognise one remarkable achievement. He has managed to influence comrade Keith H. who played a leading role in the developing the Leagues economic analysis in the last decades, to retreat from his past achievements and to join the camp of this really retrograde Opposition.
Tue 18, July 2006 @ 19:48
By Keith H
In the 2003 Sixth Congress documents we wrote:
"The end of the last century already saw the economic development of global capitalism reaching its limits. Most sectors of the world went into crisis and US itself entered recession…Global capitalism entered a period of economic stagnation."
Mon 17, July 2006 @ 01:11
By Keith H
At the beginning of the 20th century Marxists in the Second International began a discussion on the significance of the rapid development of world capitalism since the mid-1890s. During the 1920s within the Comintern this debate took the form of whether long cycle of capitalist development lasting about 50 years could be discerned from at least the early 19th century, consisting of downward and upwards phases approximately equal in length, and if so what were the causes of such long cycles. The leading proponent of the theory was the Russian Kondratiev who said such cycles were governed by rhythmic cycles whose duration were determined by the effect of major capital investments in large scale infrastructures and their wearing out. Leon Trotsky rejected the idea of long "cycles" with its implication that they had a regular periodicity related to internal mechanisms of capitalist accumulation, similar to the short-term business cycle.
Mon 17, July 2006 @ 00:44
By Bill Jefferies
As Michael points out at the beginning of his document the reason we need a correct analysis of the world economy is because the IEC's assertion that we are in a "pre-revolutionary period" fundamentally rests on the assertion that the world capitalist economy is stagnant. If their economic analysis falls, then so does their political periodisation.
Sun 16, July 2006 @ 23:01
By Michael P (For the L5I)
Has global capitalism entered a new long wave of upswing or are wein a period of stagnation and capitalist decline?
Sun 16, July 2006 @ 22:49
By Bill Jefferies...
In my previous article I demonstrated how beginning in 1992 the world economy had entered a new upward long wave. Following Trotsky I showed how this long wave fitted his definition of a long upward wave.
Sun 16, July 2006 @ 22:43
By Bill Jefferies...
Capitalism is not characterised solely by the periodic recurrence of cycles otherwise what would occur would be a complex repetition and not dynamic development. Trade-industrial cycles are of different character in different periods.
