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”
In my last post I showed how around 1966 Althusser was converted, by his collaborator Pierre Macherey, to the view that the concept of immanent structural causality should allow for, and account for, forms of order which were created in and through disorder. But the precise methodology involved remained an unresolved problem. In the autumn … Continue reading “Althusser Darwin Monod Emergence”
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”
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”
One of the most frequent objections to Marx’s value theory is that there are many commodities which are not produced by labour, yet can be given a price and sold. Marx writes that: Since money is the transformed shape of the commodity, it does not reveal what has been transformed into it: whether conscience or … Continue reading “Value, Natural Forces, and Productivity”
In the eco-socialist movement there have been frequent complaints that Marx’s value theory, with its central emphasis on labour-time, is fatally flawed and irrelevant. It seems to discount the exploitation of nature in the pursuit of profit. Students of Marx have responded by tracing the close attention which Marx and Engels gave to ecological research … Continue reading “Value Theory and the Schism in Eco-Marxism”
In an essay dated June 2005 (and republished in 2009 as Chapter 2 of The Great Recession) Michael Roberts has a perceptive account of what he calls ‘the property time bomb’. He notes that never before had real house prices risen so fast for so long in so many countries, and quotes an Economist article … Continue reading “Crisis Theory Needs a Demand Story”
At the Historical Materialism conference in London on 14 November there was a session, organized by Al Campbell, on the Marxist debate about the 2007-09 crisis and since – with papers by Michael Roberts, Al and myself. I posted an extended version of my paper in which I argued that a global surplus of money capital … Continue reading “What Caused the 2007 Crisis in the US?”
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”
I’ve been looking at some OECD data on net savings by the corporate sector in six major economies. With the exception of France, the general pattern is one of a shift in the corporate sector from being a net borrower of capital from other sectors of the economy – to one in which the corporate … Continue reading “Corporate Cash Piles”
Readings of Capital 