When European Central Bank president Mario Draghi recently told German tabloid Bild ”The worst is over,” he was talking about government budgets and European banks’ balance sheets. It is a completely different story for workers through-out Europe who are finding their trade union rights undermined, their wages squeezed, their retirement age raised and their pensions cut while the employers are granted more and increasing power. 27 European Union members are implementing austerity measures to the tune of about 450 billion euros. Such austerity measures have been portrayed as a necessary part of bringing national debts under control and making European businesses competitive, but...
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"This is not to say that Marx's ideas can't be measured against experience. His predictions need to be compared with the history of capitalism over the last 200 years. From this perspective, Marx's ideas come off very well, as the main tendencies he predicted for capitalism – towards the supplanting of human labour by machinery, the concentration and centralisation of capital, the spread of wage labour, the tendency towards widescale unemployment, and above all the recurrence of periods of depression – have been realised. In fact, I would say that Marx's theory of the tendency of the rate of...
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Business As Usual: The Economic Crisis And The Failure Of Capitalism by Paul Mattick. Reacktion Books: 2011. Just yesterday, we were all supposed to believe that the globalisation of capitalism and free markets was the route to freedom, peace and prosperity for all. Then, with barely an explanation, and somewhat out of the blue, the story changed. Now we are to believe that, due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, prosperity will have to give way to austerity. The good times are over. It is characteristic of crises that the stories we are expected to believe suddenly change. But how...
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“CARE: Dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor.” So reads a wall poster at the Haiti offices of the “humanitarian” agency CARE International. The offices are housed in a mansion in a wealthy district up in the hills above Port-au-Prince, at a hygienic distance from the poor people they are “dedicated to serve”. Well, you can’t expect the respectable ladies and gentlemen who administer aid to live and work down in the filth and stench of the shantytowns. Of course, you can’t blame the poor for the lack of sewers, but still… The aid administrators realise that they...
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The severe economic crisis has dominated newspaper headlines – day after day for at least the past six months – like no other story in recent history. The massive layoffs, losses and bankruptcies have grown as familiar as the daily death-count in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ranks of the unemployed are overflowing and no job seems secure. Not only is the situation spinning out of control, but workers are being reminded how little control they have over their lives. Their own futures are in the hands of business leaders and politicians, who themselves can do nothing more...
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Stephen Muchiri, head of the Eastern Africa Farmers Federation, stated recently that: “The amount of money used for the bailouts in the U.S. and Europe — people here are saying that money is enough to feed the poor in Africa for the next three years.” This estimate seems to be rather conservative as, according to this month’s Socialist Standard Editorial, “The sums of money hastily committed to increase banks’ liquidity and stabilise the sector would – if used to meet real human needs – ensure not one person need die of hunger for the next 23 years.” Capitalism has...
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It is not just Marx whose ideas are now been looked at again. So are those of Keynes. While the German Finance Minister, Peer Steinbrück, of the Social Democratic Party, has said that “certain parts of Marx’s thinking are really not so bad” (Times, 20 October) his British counterpart, Labourite Alistair Darling said (typically) “much of what Keynes wrote still makes sense” (Sunday Telegraph, 19 October). Commenting on this, Keynes’s biographer, Lord Skidelsky wrote “anyone under 40 might well have asked: ‘And who on earth is Keynes?’” (Times, 23 October). So discredited had the ideas and policies of Keynes...
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