Crisis & Renewal

Here’s some reading on the crises of capitalism and capitalist renewal. Mostly Marxist. Enjoy!

1. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism on wikipedia,
   1. Amongst the things they say is this, “Furthermore, in the capitalist homeland, the super-profits yielded by the colonial exploitation of a people and their economy permit businessmen to bribe native politicians, labour leaders and the labour aristocracy (upper stratum of the working class) to politically thwart worker revolt (labour strike).”
2. Will There Be A Slump? by Ted Grant 1960
   1. This was written in 1960, since then a shit load has happened. Some of his predictions are wrong, as we can see with advantage of hindsight.
   2. “The basic Marxist postulates, on this question, are that the exploitation of the working class by the capitalists means that the surplus value, created by the workers, is accumulated by the capitalists and then reinvested in industry. The explanation of the development of the economy under these conditions is the division of the economy into ‘department 1’ (production of the means of production) and ‘department 2’ (production of the means of consumption). The surplus produced by the working class, over and above its own subsistence is, apart from a small part consumed by the capitalists, ploughed back into production. The whole historic role of capitalism has been the development of the productive powers of society by the use of the surplus in capital construction. Hence the growth of production.”
3. https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/
4. carlotaperez.org/, “Technological Revolutions…”, dunno how new this was, but she backs up her theories with strong economic historical facts.
5. https://www.marxist.com/marxism-theory-long-waves-kondratiev141100.htm
6. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/04/capdevel.htm
7. https://thenextrecession.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/cycles-in-capitalism.pdf, a .pdf
8. “kondratieff wave”, definition from corporatefinanceinstitute.com, the featured image came from this article.
   1. They say, with other things, “Of course, not all economists buy into the Kondratieff Wave theory. One of the reasons why some economists refuse to accept the theory is the lack of agreement on the start and end years of a wave cycle. In other words, they assert that the imprecise nature of the theory weakens its validity.”
   2. the picture tracks the US Stock Market, not GDP, these are very different things