Tag Archives: capitalism

We need a revolution to cast off monopolies and restore entrepreneurial freedom. First of two excerpts from “The Myth of Capitalism.” Bloomberg OpinionCompetition Is Dying, and Taking Capitalism With It Jonathan Tepper See also a short review of The Myth of Capitalism A lot of times, when you read reviews about books on the economy, you end up wondering what the reviewer’s ‘priors’ are as people like to say in economics. You read the review and wonder where the biases of the reviewer...

Political organizing is hard — political education shouldn’t have to be. In the best tradition of socialist pedagogy, Catalyst and Jacobin are partnering up for a new series of pamphlets, called The ABCs of Capitalism. Each one is self-contained, and can be read on its own. But the series as a whole will be internally coherent and later pamphlets will build on the earlier ones....Pamphlet one: “Understanding Capitalism.” A forty-page text explaining clearly why capitalism isn’t just a...

Recent extreme volatility and sharp drops in US stock markets underscore the instability of capitalism yet again. As many commentators now note, another economic downturn looms. We know that all the reforms and regulations imposed in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s failed to prevent both smaller downturns between 1941 and 2008 and then another big crash in 2008. Capitalism’s instability has, for centuries, resisted all efforts to overcome it with or without government...

The ‘Matching functions’ mentioined in the quote explain unemployment by assuming that finding a job or a worker takes time. And this does explain unemployment – part of it (2%-point?). The rest must be explained by crises and the inability of the market system to create jobs. As is clear from comparing graph 2, short-lived crises cause lower levels of job creation and higher levels of job destruction. Basically, these swings are not even that large. But together they lead to a fast...

Last Friday I took part in a panel to launch a new book, World in Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx’s Law of Profitability, published by Haymarket Books, edited by Michael Roberts and Guglielmo Carchedi. The presentation was at this year’s Historical Materialism conference in London. My presentation was on ‘Finance, Imperialism and Profits’, in which I stressed the need to develop Marx’s theory in order to explain the world today. I argued that an accurate measure of a rate of profit (in...

One of the Anonymati [Anonymouses? Anonymice?] asks that I write a critique of the oh so sober, serious analysis of socialism, complete with charts and graphs, produced by the President’s Council of Economic Advisors....I have read the Executive Summary of the report and scanned through the report itself, but I do not intend to take issue with it, and my reason for not doing so is the real subject of this post. Let me begin by reminding you that Karl Marx, who wrote 5000 pages, more or...

The Trump White House research team have issued a very strange report. It’s called “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,”. It purports to prove that ‘socialism’ and ‘socialist’ policies would be damaging to Americans because the ‘opportunity costs’ of socialism compared to capitalism are so much higher. What is strange and rather amusing is that the White House advisers to Trump deem it necessary to explain to Americans the failures of ‘socialism’ in 2018. But when you delve into the...

Michael Calderbank speaks to Marxist economist Costas Lapavitsas ahead of the publication of his provocative new book The Left Case Against the EUCostas Lapavitsas  The book is obviously a critique of the EU as it stands. It’s an assessment of where the union is, what it has become, and its likely direction. It is an attempt to say that the left should have nothing to do with defending this set of institutions. It should assume a critical, rejectionist position. I am asserting that this is...

I believe that these corrosive moral claims derive from a fundamentally flawed understanding of how market capitalism works, grounded in the dubious assumption that human beings are “homo economicus”: perfectly selfish, perfectly rational, and relentlessly self-maximizing. It is this behavioral model upon which all the other models of orthodox economics are built. And it is nonsense. The last 40 years of research across multiple scientific disciplines has proven, with certainty, that homo...

The premise and promise of capitalism, going back to Adam Smith, have been that global wealth would increase and serve as a benefit to all of humanity.2 However, the experience of recent decades has challenged those claims: while global wealth has indeed grown, most of the increase has been captured by a small group at the top. This has continued into the“recovery” in the United States and globally. The result is that an obscenely unequal distribution of the world’s wealth has become even...