The life blood of capitalism Official figures reveal that US corporate profits as share of GDP have moved up from lows in 2001 to reach near record levels in 2005. But if you look over the much longer term, US profits are still below the levels achieved in the 'golden years' of capitalism back in the 1960s. The steady decline of the ability of capitalists to extract profits from their workforces is revealed even more clearly when we look at the profit figures before tax.
Marx's Economics and Lord Desai's "revenge": A response to the book "Marx's Revenge" by Meghnad Desai - Part Five Marxist economics answers the question ‘how did the many start poor?’ with an analysis of primitive accumulation, the historical process of the dispossession of the toilers from the means of production and creation of a propertyless working class. We then go on to explain capitalist production as the production not just of commodities, but also of rich and poor. Reproduction is the reproduction not just of factories and offices, but of the capitalists who own them and the workers who labour in them.
Marx's Economics and Lord Desai's "revenge": A response to the book "Marx's Revenge" by Meghnad Desai - Part Six The socialist calculation debate is usually regarded as beginning in 1920 with a challenge to the socialists thrown down by the right wing Austrian economist von Mises. He opined that rational economic calculation would be impossible in a socialist commonwealth. Unfortunately, the socialists who took up this challenge did not, with the sole exception of Maurice Dobb of the British Communist Party, regard themselves as Marxists.
