Andrew Kliman: The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession (2011)

“The recent financial crisis and Great Recession have been analysed endlessly in the mainstream and academia, but this is the first book to conclude, on the basis of in-depth analyses of official US data, that Marx’s crisis theory can explain these events.

Marx believed that the rate of profit has a tendency to fall, leading to economic crises and recessions. Many economists, Marxists among them, have dismissed this theory out of hand, but Andrew Kliman’s careful data analysis shows that the rate of profit did indeed decline after the post-World War II boom and that free-market policies failed to reverse the decline. The fall in profitability led to sluggish investment and economic growth, mounting debt problems, desperate attempts of governments to fight these problems by piling up even more debt – and ultimately to the Great Recession.

Kliman’s conclusion is simple but shocking: short of socialist transformation, the only way to escape the ‘new normal’ of a stagnant, crisis-prone economy is to restore profitability through full-scale destruction of existing wealth, something not seen since the Depression of the 1930s.”

Publisher Pluto Press, 2011
ISBN 0745332390, 9780745332390
256 pages

Reviews: Matthew Wood (Marx & Philosophy, 2013), David J. Bailey (Political Studies Review, 2013), Michael Roberts (2011), Tibor Rutar (n.d.).

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Alessio Lunghi, Seth Wheeler (eds.): Occupy Everything! Reflections on why it’s kicking off everywhere (2012)

Penned after the 2010 European student unrest and before what is now commonly referred to as the “Arab spring” began to escalate, BBC Newsnight economist Paul Mason’s “20 Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere” sought to establish an understanding of the motivations behind these globally disparate, yet somehow connected struggles.

What roles do the “graduate with no future,” the “digital native” or the “remainder of capital” play in the current wave of unrest? What are the ideas, ideologies, motivations or demands driving these movements? How is struggle organized and coordinated in the age of memetic politics and viral ad campaigns?

This collection of essays seeks to further explore Paul Mason’s original 20 Reasons in an attempt to better understand our turbulent present.

Contributors: 500 Hammers – Thomas Gillespie & Victoria Habermehl – The Free Association – Deterritorial Support Group – Ben Lear & Raph Schlembach – Camille Barbagallo & Nicholas Beuret – David Robertshaw, Rohan Orton & Will Barker – Antonis Vradis – Tabitha Bast & Hannah McClure – Andre Pusey & Bertie Russell – Federico Campagna – Emma Dowling

Publisher Minor Compositions, an imprint of Autonomedia, 2012
ISBN 978-1-57027-251-6
98 pages

Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere by Paul Mason (BBC Newsnight, February 2011)

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Aradhana Sharma, Akhil Gupta (eds.): The Anthropology of the State: A Reader (2005)

This innovative reader brings together classic theoretical texts and cutting-edge ethnographic analyses of specific state institutions, practices, and processes and outlines an anthropological framework for rethinking future study of “the state”.

– Focuses on the institutions, spaces, ideas, practices, and representations that constitute the “state”.
– Promotes cultural and transnational approaches to the subject.
– Helps readers to make anthropological sense of the state as a cultural artifact, in the context of a neoliberalizing, transnational world.

Publisher Blackwell Publishing, 2006
ISBN 1405114681, 9781405114684
424 pages

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