by Guglielmo Carchedi (Editor), Michael Roberts (Editor)
About the Author
Gugliemo Carchedi, doctorate (1965) in Economics, University of Turin, Italy, has worked at the United Nations in New York and has taught at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of numerous articles and books in several fields of Marxist analysis and research.
Michael Roberts has worked as an economist for over thirty years in the City of London financial center. He is author of The Great Recession: A Marxist View (2009), and The Long Depression (2016).
About this book
Most mainstream economists view capitalism’s periodic breakdowns as nothing more than temporary aberrations from an otherwise unbroken path toward prosperity. For Marxists, this fundamental flaw has long been acknowledged as a central feature of the free-market system. This groundbreaking volume brings together Marxist scholars from around the world to offer an empirically grounded defense of Marx’s law of profitability and its central role in explaining capitalist crises.
“World in Crisis has a specific aim: to provide empirical validity to the hypothesis that the cause of recurring economic crises or slumps in output, investment, and employment in modern economies can be found in Marx’s law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit. Marx believed, and we agree, that this is ‘the most important law in political economy.’” —from the preface
Table of contents
Preface
Introduction
Part I. The US Economy
1. The Long Roots of the Present Crisis: Keynesians, Austerians, and Marx’s Law
2. The Old Is Dying but the New Cannot Be Born: On the Exhaustion of Western Capitalism
3. Investment, Profit and Crises: Theories and Evidence
Part II. The International Dimension
4. The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall since the Nineteenth Century and a World Rate of Profit
5. Japan’s “Lost” Two Decades: A Marxist Analysis of Prolonged Capitalist Stagnation
6. The UK Rate of Profit and British Economic History
7. The Long Depression in the Spanish Economy: Bubble, Profits, and Debt
8. Surplus Value, Profit, and Unproductive Labor in the Greek Economy, 1958–2013
9. The Profit Rate in Brazil, 1953–2008
10. The Chinese Economic Crisis: A Marxist Approach
Part III. Credit, Fictitious Capital and Crises
11. Debt Matters
12. The Neoliberal Financialization of the US Economy
13. The Roots of the Global Crisis: Marx’s Law of Falling Profitability and the US Economy, 1950–2013
14. Derivatives and Capitalist Markets: The Speculative Heart of Capital
15. High-Frequency Trading: The Unfolding History of Speculative Capital
Part IV. The Crisis and the Euro
16. From the Crisis in Surplus Value to the Crisis in the Euro
17. The Euro Crisis Is a Crisis of Capitalism
Contributors
Index
Length: 450 pages
Publisher: Haymarket Books (October 1, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9781608461813
ISBN-13: 978-1608461813