José Carlos Mariátegui book now available: History of the World Crisis and Other Writings

212 pages; softcover.  Price: $20.00 USD (plus shipping: $5.00 US, $22.50 int’l); published by Marxists Internet Archive; ISBN: 978-0-692-88676-2

Orders:  http://www.erythrospress.com/store/mariategui.html

José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), the founder and director of the seminal journal Amauta and of the Peruvian Socialist Party, is regarded as one of Peru’s, and Latin America’s most influential and original Marxist thinkers.  Indeed, in the three-quarters of a century since his death, interest in Mariátegui and his ideas has waned but little, if at all.

The main selection in this volume, History of the World Crisis, consists of a series of lectures delivered to workers’ schools by Mariátegui upon his return to Peru after a four-year stay in Europe.  In those seventeen lectures, delivered between June 1923 and January 1924, Mariátegui insightfully and incisively examines the post-World War I world crisis, the weakening of

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

45th anniversary of his murder: Remembering Ghassan Kanafani (April 8, 1936-July 8, 1972)

Ghassan Kanafani

by As’ad AbuKhalil

In the early 1970s, three Palestinian intellectuals – Ghassan Kanafani, Majed Abu Sharar and Kamal Nasser – collaborated to form the Palestine Liberation Organization’s information office.

Within a decade, Israeli terrorists managed to kill all three – Kanafani in 1972, Nasser in 1973 and Abu Sharar in 1981.

The Zionist movement has never bothered to distinguish in its killing campaigns between civilians and military targets: in fact, on many occasions the Israeli government (or even the Zionist movement before the establishment of the occupation state) targeted civilians on purpose to create terror among the population. Presumably, Israel wanted to kill Kanafani and silence his voice. Yet the plan did not work as intended.

Forty-five years this month since his assassination, Kanafani’s presence is

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

Movie review: The Young Karl Marx

by Daphna Whitmore

This movie is two hours of non-stop Marxist banter. Tossing around the ideas of Marx, Engels, Proudon, Bakunin and Weitling, with references to Hegel here and there, it should be as dry as hell, even for a hardened Marxist. It’s not. It is rivetting. At the Auckland International Film Festival the audience stayed and applauded as the credits rolled.

The opening scene has destitute folk collecting firewood in a forest, and moments later they are savagely beaten by police on horseback. Marx contemplates how gathering dry wood, fallen from the trees and destined to rot on the forest floor, can be treated as an act of property theft? 

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