Economy

In the 1980s there was a debate within the Marxist tendency about productive and unproductive labour. Here we provide a contribution to that debate by Mick Brooks. Although this is archive material, we believe it will help today’s generation to better understand capitalism in order to overthrow it.

As the Chinese bureaucracy pushes the economy of China more and more along the capitalist road, more contradictions are appearing. The more the economy is integrated into the world market the more it will be prone to all the ups and downs of world capitalism. A serious slowdown on a world scale will have devastating effects.

In 1916 in the midst of the First World War Lenin produced a Marxist masterpiece, entitled “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”. With US imperialism extending its domination over the whole of the world, this book is more relevant than ever. Eighty years after Lenin’s death we publish an appraisal of this classic work.

Who produces the wealth and who gains most from its production? In a pamphlet written 97 years ago, John Wheatley described an imaginary court case, with a coalmaster, a landowner and several others being charged with “having conspired together and robbed an old miner, Dick McGonnagle." Its basic class analysis remains valid for workers today as they are still being robbed.

Henry Ford had a mythical reputation as a “people's capitalist”, a man who was smart enough to design a car that ordinary workers could afford, and a boss who paid his workers enough to buy Ford cars. Nothing could be further from the truth! The great lesson of labour relations at Ford's from its beginning is that every improvement for the workers was gained through bitter and unremitting struggle. By Mick Brooks

Paying particular attention to the US, European and Chinese economies, Michael Roberts analyses the real state of the world economy. As we head into the Christmas season, things are not looking so merry for world capitalism.

The news that Kerry has conceded defeat has just come through. We will publish a full analysis of the US election results tomorrow. In the meantime we are publishing this article which looks at the state of the US economy and traces its long term decline. Whether Bush or Kerry had won it would not have made a fundamental difference. They both defend US imperialism. They could not come out with fundamentally different policies for they are tied to the same basic economic interests. In fact the extreme similarity between the two explains why Kerry could not defeat Bush. Any policy based on the US economy as it is today means one thing: an attack on the living standards of American...

Over the summer, world stock markets trod water. Indeed, the movement up or down in share prices was the smallest since 1979. That tells us that investors in capitalism are really unsure whether the world economy is set for sustained growth (as their political leaders tell them it is) or not.

The US and British capitalists are gloating about how their economies are currently growing at 3-4% a year while Europe's big capitalist economies and Japan are hardly managing 2%. However, there is another side to this. Two recent reports show that the US and Britain also hold the record for the highest levels of poverty and social inequality. Capitalism only works for some.

In the USA, in Britain, even in Japan all the talk is now of economic recovery and boom. But scratch just a little below the surface and a completely different picture emerges - one of longer hours, later retirement, huge personal debt and a growing polarisation between rich and poor. The main European powers have all this and hardly any economic growth to talk of. Michael Roberts looks at the real state of the economy in the advanced capitalist world.

The German economy is the largest in Europe. Since the recession of 2001, the German government has been claiming an economic upswing is imminent. But are these predictions realistic? Christoph Mürdter analyses the real direction of the German economy.

Has British capitalism has finally overcome what used to be called the British disease: slower growth, higher inflation, continual currency crises and a falling behind in living standards compared with the US, Europe and Japan? Growth figures actually disguise a far more diseased system that the media would like us to see.

If you think things in the USA are bad now, wait till after the US elections. Once the result is in the bag (either for Bush or whoever stands for the Democrats) economic policy will switch from the present spending spree (mainly on arms) to cuts in welfare. The present level of indebtedness cannot be maintained for ever. Sooner or later the capitalists will make the workers pay.

The big financial institutions and investors have become hugely optimistic about the revival of economic growth and employment. They reckon that the weapons of mass growth (WMG) will be found. Everything is looking better, according to the latest intelligence sources, Messrs Bush, Blair, Schroeder and Greenspan tell us.  The reality is that US growth in 2003 was artificially created and will prove to be ephemeral in 2004.

Further to the publication of the Introduction to debate between AG and MB on The tendency of the rate of profit to fall and post-war capitalism and A reply to AG by Mick Brooks, we are publishing this piece by Mick Brooks which puts that debate into the context of the decline of British capitalism after the Second World War. It highlights the crisis of bourgeois economic theory and also the limitations in the method of AG.