What have the capitalists learned from the global financial crash of 2007?

October 24, 2007: Merrill Lynch goes down

by Michael Roberts

It is exactly 10 years since the global financial crash began with the news that the French bank, BNP, had suspended its sub-prime mortgage funds because of “an evaporation of liquidity”.¹

Within six months, credit tightened and inter-bank interest rates rocketed. Banks across the globe began to experience huge losses on the derivative funds set up to profit from the housing boom that had taken off in the US, but had started to falter. And the US and the world entered what was later called the great recession – the worst slump in world production and trade since the 1930s.

Ten years later, it is worth reminding ourselves of some of the lessons and implications of that economic earthquake.² First, the official institutions and mainstream economists never saw

Ireland’s gay prime minister – class versus identity politics

The retirement of southern Irish taoiseach (prime minister) Enda Kenny several months ago led to Leo Varadkar taking his place.  Varadkar is young, gay and his father is an Indian immigrant to Ireland.  Varadkar’s victory in the leadership contest in the Fine Gael party and assumption of the role of prime minister has been widely hailed as some kind of victory for gay rights and anti-racism.  Varadkar, however, is a committed anti-working class politician, with no track record of campaigning for either gay or migrant rights.  Varadkar  is no friend of the oppressed and exploited – quite the contrary.  The article is taken from the Irish Socialist Democracy website here, where it appeared on June 30.  It is a timely reminder that people need to be judged by their politics rather than being lauded because they are gay and/or female and/or brown.

The election of Leo Varadkar as Fine Gael leader – and his assumption of the role of Taoiseach – has been hailed as a watershed event in Ireland.  This perspective – which is particularity prevalent in international media coverage – carries the assumption that identity is the overriding factor in contemporary politics.  Within this framework the election of a relatively young gay man of ethnic migrant descent – standing in stark contrast to the profile of leaders that went before – is indeed a seminal event.  The other assumption attached to this identity-centred perspective is that a person from such a background will have a more liberal approach to politics.  However, a consideration of the record of Leo Varadkar quickly debunks such assumptions.      

Right-wing

Despite his relative youth, Varadkar is a long standing member of Fine Gael (he claims to have joined as a 17 year old) – the most conservative party in the state – and has consistently occupied the most right-wing positions on a range of issues, including those related to sexuality and race.  In 2010 he opposed the Civil Partnership Bill and also raised concerns over the prospect of gay couples 

Labour and the politics of bourgeois respectability & low horizons

Epitomising sanctimonious bourgeois respectability

by Phil Duncan

Labour is, politically, a respectable bourgeois party.

Sociologically, it is peopled largely by respectable liberal middle class people.  Just take a look at the backgrounds of Labour MPs, the party’s top managers and new folks on the Labour party list for September.

They are overwhelmingly people who are thoroughly removed from the reality of poverty and people struggling to make ends meet.

They want all the poor people – people struggling to survive on the smell of an oily rag – to be respectably bourgeois like themselves. Such well-behaved poor people can then be grateful supplicants, looked after by the patronising Labour do-gooders.

And poor people who help themselves – like to a few extra bucks to feed their kids, as Metiria Turei did – are to be roundly condemned by respectable bourgeois like Jacinda Ardern and her idiot fan club.

Reminds me of the

Marx versus the Keynesians and the austerians

by Michael Roberts

Were the policies of so-called austerity the cause of the Great Recession?  If there had been no austerity would there have been no ensuing depression or stagnation in the major capitalist economies?  If so, does that mean the policies of ‘Austerian’ governments were just madness, entirely based on ideology and bad economics?

For Keynesians, the answer is ‘yes’ to all these questions.  And it is the Keynesians who dominate the thinking of the left and the labour movement as the alternative to pro-capitalist policies.  If the Keynesians are right, then the Great Recession and the ensuing Long Depression could have been avoided with sufficient ‘fiscal stimulus’ to the capitalist economy through more government spending and running budget deficits (i.e. not balancing the government books and not worrying about rising public debt levels).

That is certainly the conclusion of yet another article in the British centre-left paper, the Guardian.  The author Phil McDuff argues that holding down wages and cutting government spending as adopted by the US and UK governments, among others, was ‘zombie economics’ “ideas that are constantly discredited but insist on shambling back to life and lurching their way through our public discourse.”  Austerity was absurd economically and the article reels off a list of prominent Keynesians (Simon Wren-Lewis, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stigltiz, John Quiggin) who argue that ‘austerity economics’ was wrong (bad economics) and was really just ideology. In contrast, the Keynesians reckon that “the government does everyone a service by running

London conference, Sept 19/20: Capital 150 – Marx’s Capital Today

Location: Student Central (formerly ULU), London WC1E 7HY, Malet Street,

Conference attendance fee £10.

Date/time: Tuesday 19 September (11am-8pm) – Wednesday 20 September 2017 (10am – 4pm)

Contact: capital150conference@gmail.com

Registration URL: http://bit.ly/2uhukxO

King’s College website details here.

Tuesday 19 September

 

Crises (11am–1:30pm)

• Guglielmo Carchedi – The old is dying and the new cannot be born: the exhaustion of the present phase of capitalist development
• Rolf Hecker – Marx’s critique of capitalism during the 1857 crisis
• Paul Mattick jr – Crisis: abstraction and reality
• Ben Fine, discussant

 

Imperialism (2:30pm–5pm)

• Marcelo Dias Carcanholo, Dependency, super-exploitation of labour and crisis – an interpretation from Marx
• Tony Norfield, Das Kapital, finance, and imperialism
• Raquel Varela (& Marcelo Badaró Mattos), Primitive accumulation in Das Kapital

 

Mapping the terrain of anti-capitalist struggles (6pm–8pm)

• David Harvey, Perspectives from the Circulation of Capital
• Michael Roberts, Perspectives from the Accumulation of Capital

Wednesday 20 September

 

The future of capital (10am–12:30noon)

Corbyn’s Labour, British imperialism and the working class

Below is the text of a talk delivered by Dani in Dunedin on Friday, July 21.

by Dani Sanmugathasan

Good evening! My name is Dani Sanmugathasan, and I am a member of the British Marxist and Leninist organisation called the Revolutionary Communist Group. The following talk will be on the topic of ‘Corbynmania’ – the opportunist phenomenon that’s swept through the labour movements in core economies over the last two years – and a good place to start is at the events in London earlier this month.

INTRODUCTION

“Oh, Je-re-my Cor-byn!” rang out the chants of many on the streets of London on the 1^st of July at the People’s Assembly’s ‘Tories Out’ march. The People’s Assembly, Momentum, Radical Housing Network, the Socialist Workers Party, the Stop the War Coalition, the Socialist Party, and the large trade unions (PCS, RMT, CWU, Unison, Len McCluskey’s Unite the Union…) were all rallying round the Labour Party leader, the holy Son of Attlee, the man who would save Britain from the iron grip of Tory austerity.

But beside these organisations, a distinct second current of marchers – composed of such organisations as Class War, the Focus E15 Mothers, Lesbians & Gays Support the Migrants, Architects for Social Housing, Movement For Justice, the Revolutionary Communist Group, and trade unions like the IWGB – led a different chant: “Labour, Tory, same old story!” These groups made

Corbyn’s Labour – still wedded to capitalism; British ‘far left’ – still wedded to Labour

by Workers Fight

The recent developments on the political scene in Britain have thrown usually clever commentators and political pundits into a mild state of confusion. After all, it was one thing getting the result of the 2016 EU referendum completely wrong, but they also lost their bets on Theresa May’s “snap” election this June.

In fact almost everyone was surprised by the result, but maybe primarily by the surge in Labour’s votes, with 40% of the total, despite the Tory’s apparently unassailable lead in the polls before the election.

It should be said however, that whoever was to lead the government, whether it was May or Corbyn, or someone else, with or without alliances, this government was always going to have the job of managing the affairs of British capital to the best of its interests.

The working class, as history shows us, has never made any real gains through the ballot box and has nothing to expect from any government – because it is the capitalists who are pulling all the strings behind the “democratic” mask of a Corbyn or a May. What is more, there has been no place on the agenda of any government of the capitalist class for significant reforms which could be offered to workers, in any case not since the end of the post-war boom at the beginning of the 1970s. Since then, the world economy has been in a