The failure of capitalist production : underlying causes of the Great Recession / Andrew Kliman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kliman, Andrew, 1955-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Business cycles--United States--History.

Business cycles.

Financial crises--United States--History--21st century.

Financial crises.

Recessions--United States--History--21st century.

Recessions.

Rate of return--United States--History.

Rate of return.

History.

United States.

Physical Description:

xiii, 240 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Pluto Press, 2012.

Summary:

The reasons behind the global financial crisis and the Great Recession are the subject of much debate. This is the first book to conclude, on the basis of in-depth analyses of official U.S. 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. He shows that free-market policies have failed to reverse that decline. This fall in profitability led to sluggish investment and economic growth, mounting debt problems, desperate attempts by governments to fight these problems by piling up even more debt - ultimately ending in 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 the value of existing capital assets, something not seen since the Depression of the 1930s. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Introduction 1

2 Profitability, the Credit System, and the "Destruction of Capital" 13

3 Double, Double, Toil and Trouble: Dot-com Boom and Home-price Bubble 28

4 The 1970s-Not the 1980s-as Turning Point 48

5 Falling Rates of Profit and Accumulation 74

6 The Current-cost "Rate of Profit" 102

7 Why the Rate of Profit Fell 123

8 The Underconsumptionist Alternative 151

9 What is to be Undone? 181.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 227-233) and index.

ISBN:

9780745332390

0745332390

0745332404

9780745332406

OCLC:

748328618