Description
Book SynopsisDistinctive and detailed account of the current economic crisis.
Trade Review'Essential reading for all Marxists and lefts interested in what caused the Great Recession. It debunks the fads and fashionable arguments of neoliberalism, underconsumption and inequality with a battery of facts. It restores Marx's law of profitability to the centre of any explanation of capitalist crisis with compelling evidence and searching analysis. It must be read' -- Michael Roberts
'One of the very best of the rapidly growing series of works seeking to explain our economic crisis. ... The scholarship is exemplary and the writing is crystal clear' -- Professor Bertell Ollman, Department of Politics, NYU, author of Dance of the Dialectic
'Among the myriad publications on the present day crisis, this work stands out as something unusual. Kliman is an excellent theorist, and an equally excellent analyst of empirical data' -- Paresh Chattopadhyay, Université du Québec à Montréal
'Clear, rigorous and combative. Kliman demonstrates that the current economic crisis is a consequence of the fundamental dynamic of capitalism, unlike the vast bulk of superficial contemporary commentary that passes for economic analysis' -- Rick Kuhn, Deutscher Prize winner, Reader in Politics at the Australian National University and long-time activist.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
List of Tables
List of Figures
1. Introduction
2. Profitability, the Credit System, and the “Destruction of Capital”
3. Double, Double, Toil and Trouble: Dot-com boom and home-price bubble
4. The 1970s––Not the 1980s––as Turning Point
5. Falling Rates of Profit and Accumulation
6. The Current-cost “Rate of Profit”
7. Why the Rate of Profit Fell
8. The Underconsumptionist Alternative
9. What Is to Be Undone?
Bibliography
Index
