On the recent (2018) debate over value theory between David Harvey and his critics A short essay by David Harvey, raising some questions about value theory in Marx, has provoked the polemical responses he may well have expected. First onto the field to defend his version of orthodoxy came the redoubtable Michael Roberts, who was … Continue reading “A Debate on Value Theory Guest Post by Pete Green”
The panel discussion of The Long Depression, the recent book by Michael Roberts, was one of the highlights of this year’s 2016 Historical Materialism conference in London. Michael himself opened the session with a summary of the core arguments of the book, focusing on what he describes as the third great depression in the history … Continue reading “Marxist Theory and the Long Depression A Guest Post by Pete Green”
I have returned to an long-standing interest in causality in Marx’s political economy as a result of involvement in controversies about the falling rate of profit. In particular a debate with Michael Roberts, currently one of the leading exponents of the thesis that the fundamental and decisive cause of capitalist crisis is the tendency of … Continue reading “Causality and the Rate of Profit”
In Marxist debate about the causes of the 2007-9 crisis in the US it is often assumed that we must choose between seeing it as either simply a financial crisis, or as one whose basic cause was a failure of profitability in the productive sector. Many believe that the fundamental primacy of production in Marxist … Continue reading “House Prices and Consumer Demand in the 2007-9 US Crisis”
It is instructive to follow Marx as he makes a close analysis of the commercial crisis of 1847 in a text written in 1850 with Engels as co-author.[i] The later sections of this account deal with the 1847 crisis in Europe as a trigger for the revolutions of 1848. Here I focus on the discussion … Continue reading “Marx on the 1847 Crisis”
One of the major developments in the world economy over the past 15 years has been the extraordinary fall in average real interest rates. (after allowing for inflation.) As the graph below shows, the world average fell from 4 per cent in the 1990s, to 2 per cent in the period just before the financial crisis of … Continue reading “Falling Interest Rates and the Weakening of Central Bank Control”
Readings of Capital 