1 James K. Galbraith, ‘Who Are These Economists, Anyway?’, Thought & Action, 25 (2009), p. 95.
2 Galbraith dismisses contemporary Marxists for their ‘focus on the “real economy”, as opposed to finance, which ‘means that the radical tradition does not truly provide a theory of financial crisis’ (ibid., pp. 88–9). However true this may be for today’s Marxists – the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘financial economy’ really derives from Keynes, a major influence on academic Marxist economics – it does not hold for Marx himself.
3 For anyone in danger of taking economic statistics for literal truths, Oskar Morgenstern’s classic On the Accuracy of Economic Observations, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ, 1963) is indispensable.
1 Richard A. Posner, the US appeals court judge and economic pundit, called the downturn a depression in his book, A Failure of Capitalism; more significantly, economists Barry Eichengreen and Kevin H. O’Rourke insisted in 2009, on the basis of a careful review of data, that ‘it’s a depression alright’, pointing out that ‘[f]ocusing on the US causes one to minimize [the] alarming fact’ that ‘globally we are tracking or doing worse than the Great Depression’ (At www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3421, last accessed 10 November 2010).
2 Paul Krugman, ‘Reform or Bust’, New York Times (20 September 2009). It was with more solicitude for banks that Fed chairman Bernanke described the Obama government’s decision to limit salaries at some financial firms receiving federal handouts as a way ‘to ensure that compensation packages appropriately tie rewards to longer-term performance and do not create undue risks for the firm or the financial system’. ‘Fed to Monitor Pay of Bankers to Curtail Risk’, New York Times (23 October 2009), p. 1.
3 The idea of an undervalued renminbi, much harped upon in American economic commentary, may in fact be something of an exaggeration; see Tao Wang, ‘Exchange Rate Dynamics’, in Eswar Prasad, ed., China’s Growth and Integration into the World Economy: Prospects and Challenges (Washington, DC, 2004), pp. 21–8.
4 ‘Asia’s Revenge’, Financial Times (8 October 2008).
5 Martin Wolf, Why Globalization Works (New Haven, CT, 2004), p. 184.
6 Robert E. Lucas Jr, ‘Mortgages and Monetary Policy’, Wall Street Journal (19 September 2007), p. 20.
7 For example, ‘Post-Keynesian’ economist Paul Davidson argued that while ‘Keynes won the policy battles of the first three decades after the publication of The General Theory’, in terms of dominant theory “Keynesians” had erected a ‘neo-classical synthesis’ micro foundation to Keynes’s macroeconomics which could not logically support Keynes’s general case’; International Money and the Real World, 2nd edn (New York, 1992), p. 66. While true, this did not prevent Paul Samuelson, leading producer of the neoclassical synthesis, from garnering a Nobel Prize, top status among professional economists, and a large extra income from his widely assigned economics textbook.
8 At www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html (last accessed 20 December 2010)
9 Financial Times (5 August 2009).
10 Todd A. Knoop, Recessions and Depressions: Understanding Business Cycles (Westport, CT, 2004), p. 125.
11 G. Cooper, The Origin of Financial Crises (New York, 2008), p. 93.
12 For brief versions of the argument, see David Kotz, ‘Crisis and Neoliberal Capitalism’, Robert Pollin, ‘We’re All Minskyites Now’ and Steve Keen, ‘The “Credit Tsunami”’, in Gerald Friedman et al., The Economic Crisis Reader: Readings in Economics, Politics, and Social Policy from Dollars & Sense (Boston, MA, 2009), pp. 34–50.
13 David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (London, 2010), p. 117. More or less the same argument is made by Engelbert Stockhammer in ‘Neoliberalism, Income Distribution and the Causes of the Crisis’, Research on Money and Finance, 19 (at www.researchonmoneyandfinance.org/discussion-papers, last accessed 10 November 2010) and, without Marxist flourishes, by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in ‘How to End the Great Recession’, New York Times (3 September 2010), p. A21. For a discussion of Harvey’s confusion of Marxian and Keynesian theory, see my review of his The Limits to Capital, in Historical Materialism, 16 (2008), pp. 205–32.
14 ‘China raises estimate of economic growth in 2009 to 9.1%’, New York Times (3 July 2010), p. B2; Brice Pedroletti, ‘Quand la Chine se ruinera . . .’, Le Monde (22 June 2010), p. 3.
15 Robert Brenner, Economía de la turbolencia global (Madrid, 2009); an English version of the prologue to this publication, from which I quote, is available at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0sg0782h under the title ‘What is Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America: The Origins of the Current Crisis’ (last accessed 10 November 2010), p. 62.
1 Cited by the Baltimore Niles Weekly Register, XLVIII/1233 (9 May 1835), pp. 167–8; in John Sperling, Great Depressions, 1837–1844, 1893–1898, 1929–1939 (Glenview, IL, 1966), p. 26.
2 Ibid., p. 32.
3 Ibid., p. 57.
4 For a good introduction, see Maurice Flamant and Jeanne Singer-Kérel, Modern Economic Crises and Recessions (New York, 1970).
5 Commentators give different dates for the duration of the Great Depression. With reference to the US, for example, some interpret the upturn of 1933 as its conclusion, to be followed by another recession in 1937–8; others, ascribing the 1933–6 recovery to three years of government stimulus spending, find the true end of the depression in the expansion made possible by the start of massive war production in 1939. Of course, the latter was, economically speaking, just another form of stimulus, though one more acceptable than earlier New Deal measures because it funnelled money to corporations rather than directly to jobless workers, and because the war laid the basis for American dominance of the world economy. It was not until 1946 that the capitalist economy was once more able to expand without essential dependence on government spending. For an outstanding history, see Broadus Mitchell, Depression Decade: From New Era through New Deal, 1929–1941 (New York, 1947).
6 Todd A. Knoop, Recessions and Depressions. Understanding Business Cycles (Westport, CT, 2004), pp. 8, 3.
7 Prix Bordin, Section d’économie politique et statistique, Académie des sciences morales et politiques, Séances et travaux (Paris, 1860), p. 186.
8 C. Juglar, Des Crises Commerciales et de leur retour périodique in France, en Angleterre, et aux États-Unis (Paris, 1862), p. vii.
9 Gottfried von Haberler, Prosperity and Depression: A Theoretical Study of Cyclical Movements (Geneva, 1937).
10 J.-C.-L. Simonde de Sismondi, New Principles of Political Economy: Of Wealth in Its Relation to Population, trans. Richard Hyse (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991), p. 2.
11 George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Schiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton, NJ, 2009).
12 Christina Romer, ‘Business Cycles’, The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, at www.econlib.org/library/Enc/BusinessCycles.html (last accessed 20 December 2010).
13 Haberler, Prosperity and Depression, pp. 167–68.
14 Michael von Tugan-Baranowski, Studien zur Theorie und Geschichte der Handelskrisen in England (Jena, 1901).
15 W. C. Mitchell, Business Cycles: The Problem and Its Setting (New York, 1927), pp. 2, 1.
16 Ibid., p. 2.
17 Ibid., p. 75.
18 Ibid., p. 106.
19 Ibid., p. 107.
20 One reason for the iffy nature of economic statistics is the highly theory-driven nature of many of the calculations involved in the creation of GDP data; for example, owner-occupied housing is treated as ‘worth’ the amount that would have been paid to rent it. In this connection, chapter Fourteen, ‘National Income Statistics’, in Oskar Morgenstern, On the Accuracy of Economic Observations, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ, 1963), is particularly instructive.
21 Economics began, in fact, with the study of the economy as a whole, most notably in the works of the French ‘Physiocrats’, who influenced the classical economists in their attempts to understand the conditions regulating the ‘wealth of nations’, as Adam Smith called what is now known as national income. Classical theory was in turn the stepping-off point for Marx’s analysis of capitalist economic development. Keynes’s macro economics was thus a novelty only in relation to the neoclassical restriction of inquiry to the economic behaviour of individual households and firms.
22 John M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York, 1936), pp. 23–4.
23 Ibid., p. 27.
24 Philip Mirowski, More Heat Than Light. Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics (Cambridge, 1989), p. 307. Or, in the words of an earlier account, ‘By stressing consumption and income, [Keynes] in effect removed the spotlight from the determinants of investment and accumulation, the phenomena which every major theorist before him had identified as the critical variables in macroeconomic instability’; Philip Mirowski, The Birth of the Business Cycle (New York, 1985), p. 113.
25 Mitchell, Business Cycles, pp. 145, 173.
26 Ibid., p. 173. In an earlier book, Mitchell explained crises as produced when ‘profit margins are threatened by the encroachments of costs, when these encroachments cannot be offset by further advances in selling prices, and when the rate at which profits are capitalized is reduced by the rise in interest’, without explaining why these negative factors are bound to operate recurrently; Wesley C. Mitchell, Business Cycles and Their Causes [1913] (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1941), p. 71.
27 Hyman P. Minsky, ‘The Financial Instability Hypothesis’ [1977], in Can ‘It’ Happen Again? Essays on Instability and Finance (Armonk, NY, 1982), pp. 63, 65. Minsky appears unaware that what he considers his theory of financial instability was elaborated already in 1913 by Mitchell, who similarly located the trigger for crisis in the inability of businesses to secure new loans in the face of falling profits.
28 Oliver Blanchard, Changyong Rhee and Lawrence Summers, ‘The Stock Market, Profit, and Investment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics (February 1993), pp. 115-136.
29 José A. Tapia Granados, ‘Economists, Recessions, and Profits’, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, XXI/1 (2010), pp. 115–116.
1 We might just as well have consulted The Penguin Dictionary of Economics by G. Bannock, R. E. Baxter and R. Rees (2nd edn, Harmondsworth, 1978): Money is ‘anything which is generally acceptable as a means of settling debt’, while debt is a ‘sum of money or other property owed by one person or organization to another’.
2 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, vol. I (Oxford, 1976), pp. 22–3.
3 Ibid., pp. 26–7.
4 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise [1904] (New York, 1965), pp. 84–5.
5 Readers acquainted with the critique of political economy will recognize in the above an (extremely condensed) restatement of Karl Marx’s analysis of money in capitalism; see Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (various editions) and Capital, I/1 (various editions). For an extremely lucid explanation of Marx’s ideas, see Martha Campbell, ‘Marx’s Theory of Money: A Defense’, in New Investigations of Marx’s Method, ed. Fred Moseley and Martha Campbell (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1997), pp. 89–120, and ‘The Credit System’, in The Culmination of Capital: Essays on Volume 111 of Marx’s ‘Capital’, ed. Martha Campbell and Geert Reuten (London, 2002), pp. 212–27.
6 Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise, p. 85.
7 Marx notes that because of the dynamic complexity of the economic system this feature of money is ‘not a defect’; ‘on the contrary, it makes this [representation] the adequate one for a mode of production whose laws can only assert themselves as blindly operating averages between constant irregularities’; Capital, vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 196.
8 It is for this reason that Marx invented the concept of ‘surplus value’ to signify the excess over the production costs, in social labour time, of goods and services, treating profit, interest and rent as portions of this quantity.
9 Interest rates, measuring a deduction from business profits to pay for borrowed money, can in contrast be manipulated to a degree by government authorities, apart from their responsiveness to the forces of supply and demand for loans.
10 Angus Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy, 1820–1992 (Paris, 1995), p. 36. To take a particularly striking example of this development, the General Motors factory in Lordstown, Ohio cost $100 million to build in 1966, when it was the most automated automobile factory in the world; in 2002, GM spent $500 million to modernize the plant, which permitted reducing the workforce from 7,000 to 2,500.
11 See Marx, Capital, III/3 (various editions).
1 Maurice Flamant and Jeanne Singer-Kérel, Modern Economic Crises and Recessions (New York, 1970), pp. 76–7.
2 Barry Eichengreen, The European Economy Since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond (Princeton, NJ, 2007), pp. 55, 56.
3 Ibid., p. 58.
4 Ibid., pp. 55, 59.
5 In South Korea, similarly, ‘foreign assistance – mostly US aid – provided more than half the total resources available for capital accumulation in every year from 1955 to 1962 . . .’: Steven R. Shalom, ‘Capitalism Triumphant?’ in Zeta, 1989, p. 95.
6 Angus Maddison, The World Economy in the 20th Century (Paris, 1989), p. 34.
7 Tom Kemp, The Climax of Capitalism: The US Economy in the Twentieth Century (London, 1990), p. 132.
8 In economist-bureaucratese: ‘Increased expenditure on income maintenance reflects those concerns for social solidarity and consensus-building which have found expression in the maturing of the welfare state’: Peter Saunders and Friedrich Klau, The Role of the Public Sector, OECD Economic Studies, 4 (1985), p. 19.
9 Maddison, The World Economy, p. 69.
10 Philip A. Klein, Business Cycles in the Postwar World: Some Reflections on Recent Research, Domestic Affairs Study, 42 (Washington, DC, 1976), pp. 2–3.
11 For a detailed account, see Herbert Stein, The Fiscal Revolution in America (Chicago, IL, 1969), chaps 11–13.
12 Joyce Kolko, Restructuring the World Economy (New York, 1988), p. 19.
13 William D. Nordhaus, ‘The Falling Share of Profits’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1 (Washington, DC, 1974), p. 169. Cp. T. P. Hill, Profits and Rates of Return (Paris, 1979). In ‘Is the Rate of Profit Falling?’ Martin Feldstein and Lawrence Summers used rather unconvincing methods to argue against the conclusion from their own data of a small but steady trend decline in profitability between 1948 and 1976; while noting that ‘1970 to 1976 has generally been a period of unusually low rates of return’ they speculated hopefully that ‘the fall in the return is itself likely to be temporary’ (paper presented at the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity in April 1977, pp. 23, 26).
14 Eichengreen, The European Economy, p. 271.
15 Hyman P. Minsky, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy [1986], (New York, 2008) pp. 17–18, 27, 31.
16 Kemp, The Climax of Capitalism, p. 184.
17 New York Times (13 July 1986).
18 See Joseph A. Pechman, Who Paid the Taxes, 1966–85 (Washington, DC, 1985).
19 Robert Brenner, ‘What is Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America: The Origins of the Current Crisis’, p. 6.
20 See Kolko, Restructuring the World Economy, p. 70.
21 Paolo Giussani, ‘Empirical Evidence for Trends Toward Globalization. The Discovery of Hot Air’, International Journal of Political Economy, XXVI/3 (1996), p. 31.
22 Though, as enthusiast of globalization Martin Wolf notes, ‘globalization is considerably more limited than [its] critics suppose. In some respects the global economic integration is no more than it was a century ago before the breakdown that occurred between 1914 and 1945. In some ways it is considerably less’: Why Globalization Works (New Haven, CT, 2004), p. 95. For data confirming this judgement, see Giussani, ‘Empirical Evidence’.
23 Giussani, ‘Empirical Evidence’, p. 30. In 2006 two-thirds of total global foreign direct investment went to developed economies; the European Union alone accounted for 40 per cent of global FDI: Philip McCann, ‘Globalization, Multinationals, and BRICS’, in Globalization and Emerging Economies: Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa, ed. Raed Safadi and Ralph Lattimore (Paris, 2008), p. 91.
24 McCann, ‘Globalization, Multinationals, and BRICS’, p. 84.
25 Celso Furtado, ‘Transnationalization and Monetarism’, International Journal of Political Economy, XVII/1 (1987), p. 30.
26 Quoted in Jonathan R. Laing, ‘The Bubble’s New Home’, Barron’s (20 June 2005).
1 ‘When Will the Recession Be Over?’ New York Times (1 March 2009), p. 12.
2 See, for example, ‘No Clear Accord on Stimulus By Top 20 Industrial Nations’, New York Times (15 March 2009), p. 1.
3 ‘Pledges to Aid Weak Nations in Europe Near $1 Trillion’: New York Times (10 May 2010), p. 3.
4 ‘A Trillion for Europe, With Doubts Attached’, New York Times (11 May 2010), p. B4.
5 ‘While Everyone Fiddles’, New York Times (13 March 2009), p. 26.
6 As did the more than 200 economists, including Nobel laureates James Buchanan, Edward Prescott and Vernon Smith, who signed an advertisement appearing in the New York Times on 28 January 2009: ‘Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s . . . Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.’
7 Hence Paul Krugman’s cheery economist’s description of the effect of the war, with its 50–60 million dead, as ‘the miracle of the 1940s’. New York Times (6 September 2010), p. A19. See Paul Mattick, ‘The Great Depression and the New Deal’, in Economics, Politics, and the Age of Inflation (London, 1978), pp. 114–42.
8 See Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York, 2006), esp. pp. 62–5, 206.
9 ‘While Roosevelt had broken with the budget-balancers and resumed spending, he still [in 1938] had not embarked on the kind of massive spending which the Keynesians called for . . . The Keynesian formula for gaining prosperity by deliberately creating huge deficits year after year seemed to defy common sense. Roosevelt was willing to contemplate limited, emergency spending, but halfway measures of this sort antagonized business and added to the public debt without giving a real fillip to the economy’: William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York, 1963), p. 264.
10 Ibid., p. 244.
11 David Leonhardt, ‘Pulling Back, amid Echoes of the 1930s’ New York Times (30 June 2010), p. 3.
12 ‘G-20 Countries Agree to Halve Their Budget Deficits’, New York Times (28 June 2010), p. B7.
13 Peter Saunders and Friedrich Klau, The Role of the Public Sector: Causes and Consequences of the Growth of Government, OECD Economic Studies 4 (1985), p. 11.
14 Ibid., p. 12.
15 Ibid., p. 13.
16 Vito Tanzi and Ludger Schuknecht, Public Spending in the 20th Century: A Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2000), p. 20.
17 Ibid., p. 46.
18 Martin Jänicke, State Failure: The Impotence of Politics in Industrial Society, trans. Alan Braley (University Park, PA, 1990), p. 78.
19 Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge, 1996), p. 76.
20 Pace Martin Wolf, for whom the word ‘is an incomprehensible piece of neo-Marxist jargon’ (Why Globalism Works, p. 95), ‘neoliberalism’ works as well as any other term to refer to the post-war combination of laissez-faire ideology (and a rather high level of openness on trade and finance) with historically high levels of state involvement in the economy and an important economic role played by international entities like the World Bank and the IMF.
21 As a study prepared for the Bank for International Settlements put it, ‘the existence of a higher level of public debt is likely to reduce both the size and the effectiveness of any future fiscal response to an adverse shock. Since policy cannot play its stabilizing role, a more indebted economy will be more volatile. This was evident during the latest crisis’: Stephen G. Cecchetti, M. S. Mohanty and Fabrizio Zampoli, ‘The Future of Public Debt: Prospects and Implications’, BIS Working Papers, 300 (March 2010), p. 14.
22 ‘IMF Warns That US Debt Is Threatening Global Stability’, New York Times (8 January 2004), p. 1.
23 ‘Rising Interest on Nations’ Debt May Sap Growth’, New York Times (4 June 2009).
24 Thomas Brand and Marcos Poplawski Ribeiro, ‘La soutenabilité des finances publiques’, in L’économie mondiale 2010, ed. CEPII (Paris, 2009), p. 72.
25 ‘Sinking in Debt’, New York Times (21 October 2009), p. B4.
26 ‘Moody’s Says US Debt Could Test Triple-A Rating’, New York Times (16 March 2010), p. B1.
27 Harold G. Moulton, Controlling Factors in Economic Development (Washington, DC, 1949), p. 136.
28 Hyman P. Minsky, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, p. 31.
29 Ibid., p. 30.
30 Ibid., p. 39.
31 In the words of President Raúl Castro, ‘We have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where one can live without working.’ ‘Cuba’s Public-Sector Layoffs signal Major Shift’, New York Times (14 September 2010), p. A1.
32 ‘Saab on the Brink as Swedish Crisis Reaches Deadlock’, The Telegraph (19 February 2009).
33 Paul Krugman, ‘Fighting Off Depression’, New York Times (4 January 2009).
34 Cecchetti et al., ‘The Future of Public Debt’, p. 6.
35 Hence the conclusion of the BIS economists that ‘persistently high levels of public debt will drive down capital accumulation, productivity growth and long-term potential growth’ (ibid., p. 16). According to IMF analysts in the so-called recovery year of 1985, the years after 1983 saw ‘historically unusual proportions of private saving being absorbed by the financing of government deficits . . . [and] significantly lower proportions absorbed by gross private domestic investment . . . than during earlier recoveries’: International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook 1985, pp. 102–3.
36 Broadus Mitchell, Depression Decade: From New Era through New Deal, 1929–1941 (New York, 1947), p. 48.
37 For a thorough exploration of this issue, see Paul Mattick, Marx and Keynes: The Limits of the Mixed Economy (Boston, MA, 1967).
38 Jänicke, State Failure, pp. 24–5. ‘Of course’, Jänicke adds, ‘they get the credit if the economy prospers’ (p. 25).
1 ‘US Offers a Hand to Those On Eviction’s Edge’, New York Times (22 April 2010), p. 1.
2 In a surrealistically poetic development, some investors have found a speculative opening in the very threat of capitalistically generated catastrophe: ‘Investors, still reeling from one disaster, are betting on the likelihood of another. Amid the volatility in the markets, wealthy individuals and big institutions are flocking to hedge funds that buy so-called catastrophe bonds and other investments tied to the probability of Gulf Coast hurricanes, Japanese earthquakes, large snowfalls in Canada and other natural disasters.’ ‘Looking to Diversify, Investors Bet on Catastrophe Bonds’, New York Times (7 January 2011), p. B4.
3 Cit. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London, 2006), p. 163.
4 Paul Krugman, ‘The Joyless Economy’, New York Times (5 December 2005).
5 ‘A New World Economy: The balance of power will shift to the East as China and India evolve’, Business Week (22 August 2005). The numbers are more indicative than exact; the IMF pegs China’s growth at ‘almost 8 percent’: Eswar Prasad and Thomas Rumbaugh, ‘Overview’, in China’s Growth and Integration into the World Economy. Prospects and Challenges, ed. Eswar Prasad (Washington, DC, 2004), p. 1, while an OECD researcher figured China’s growth rate at 10.2 per cent and India’s at 9.2 per cent in 2005: Philip McCann, ‘Globalization, Multinationals, and BRICS’, in Globalization and Emerging Economies: Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa, ed. Raed Safadi and Richard Lattimore (Paris, 2008), p. 99.
6 McCann, ‘Globalization’, p. 77.
7 Prasad and Rumbaugh, ‘Overview’, p. 1.
8 McCann, ‘Globalization’, pp. 77, 103.
9 Peter d’A. Jones, The Consumer Society: A History of American Capitalism (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 173.
10 P. S. Filipov, an economist elected to the Leningrad city council in 1990, expressed the new spirit with elegant concision when he agreed ‘with those who say we must hurry quickly away from Marxism-Leninism, through Socialism, to Reaganism’: New York Times (24 June 1990), p. 1.
11 Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge, 1996), p. xii.
12 Ibid., p. xi.
13 Thus Strong argues that multinational enterprises have become de facto political entities, with effects on state policies outweighing the power of governments to regulate them (for example, with respect to taxation), a ‘shift from state authority to market authority’ that ‘has been in large part the result of state policies’; ibid., p. 44).
14 At www.oecd.org/els/employment/outlook, last accessed on 12 November 2010.
15 ‘Unemployment Surges around the World, Threatening Stability’, New York Times (15 February 2009), p. 1.
16 For example, Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, who predicted a ‘permanently higher’ unemployment rate, found no better explanation than that ‘the collective psyche has changed as a result of what we’ve been through’. Don Peck, ‘How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America’, The Atlantic (March 2010).
17 Enrico Pugliese, ‘The Europe of the Unemployed’, International Journal of Political Economy, XXIII/3 (1993), p. 15. The year 1986 saw the publication of John Keane’s and John Owens’s book After Full Employment. Japan’s relatively low unemployment figures during this period – though the 2.9 per cent measured at the end of 1985 was the highest since records began to be kept in 1953 – reflect the peculiarities of the Japanese definition of employment, which counts as employed laid-off workers, people who worked more than one hour of the last week of each month and soldiers, and counts as unemployed only those who have lost full-time work (see Joyce Kolko, Restructuring the World Economy (New York, 1988), p. 336). Kazumichi Goka, ‘Unemployment and Irregular Unemployment Under Restructuring in Today’s Japan’, International Journal of Political Economy, XXIX/1 (1999), pp. 49–64, provides a survey of the effects on employment of the Japanese depression of the 1990s; among the rare treatments of the limits of the post-war Japanese ‘economic miracle’ as workers experienced them is Satoshi Kamata, Japon: l’envers du miracle, trans. Danielle Nguyen Duc Long (Paris, 1982).
18 Martin Kronauer, ‘Unemployment in Western Europe’, International Journal of Political Economy, XXIII/3 (1993), p. 3.
19 Pugliese, ‘Europe’, p. 14.
20 ‘Unemployment Surges around the World, Threatening Stability’, ibid.
21 For a remarkably dispassionate account of unemployed movements in the US by a participant, see Paul Mattick, Arbeitslosigkeit und Arbeitslosenbewegung in den USA, 1929–1935 [1936] (Frankfurt, 1969), pp. 93ff. A particularly informative journalistic survey is Mauritz A. Hallgren, Seeds of Revolt: A Study of American Life and the Temper of the American People During the Depression (New York, 1933).
22 Mattick, Arbeitslosigkeit, p. 109.
23 Ibid., p. 114.
24 For a moving account, see ‘Cacho’, ‘The Unemployed in the Popular Rising of December, 2001. Report from Greater Buenos Aires’, in International Journal of Political Economy, XXXI/1 (2001), pp. 11–23. See also Aníbal Kohan, ¡A las calles! Una historia de los movimientos piqueteros y caceroleros de los ’90 al 2002 (Buenos Aires, 2002) and ‘Class Re-composition in Argentina’, Aufheben, 11 (2003), pp. 1–23.
25 It was the practical Keynesian Hitler who first made May Day into an official holiday.
26 ‘The Seattle General Strike’, in Root and Branch: The Rise of the Workers’ Movements, ed. Root and Branch (New York, 1975), p. 209.
27 The classic theoretical reflection on this experience remains Anton Pannekoek, Workers Councils [1946] (Oakland, CA, 2003).
28 For a short look at the impact of the Great Recession on European agriculture, see Jean-Christophe Bureau, ‘Agriculture européenne: les grands changements sont à venir’, in CEPII, L’économie mondiale 2010 (Paris, 2009), pp. 108–16.
29 German president Horst Köhler was forced to resign when he committed the unprofessional error of speaking the truth on a visit to German troops in Afghanistan: ‘A country of our size, with its focus on exports and thus reliance on foreign trade, must be aware that military deployments are necessary in an emergency to protect our interests, for example, when it comes to trade routes, for example, when it comes to preventing regional instabilities that could negatively influence our trade, jobs, and incomes’: International Herald Tribune (1 June 2010), p. 3. On the other hand, Germany has also been forced to cut military spending in the effort to control its state deficit.
30 Tom Keefer, ‘Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, and Class Struggle’, The Commoner, 13 (2008–9), p. 15.
31 Ibid., pp. 19, 20.
32 Tom Keefer, ‘Ownership, Depletion, and Control: National Oil Companies, Peak Oil, and the US Empire’, unpublished manuscript. (2009), http://bildungsuerein.kpoe-steiermarkat/texts.phtml (last accessed 20 December 2010), p. 28, citing British Petroleum, BP Statistical Review of World Energy (June 2008).
33 José A. Tapia Granados, Edward L. Ionides and Oscar Carpintero, ‘A Threatening Link Between World Economic Growth and Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations’, unpublished manuscript. (2009), http://sitemaker.umich.edu/tapia_granados/working_papers_documentos_de_trabajos&config=ioUvVQoc8r2
DEUnkS988Ew (last accessed 20 December 2010), pp. 5–7.
34 Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (New York, 2006).
35 For realistically grim speculations about the social and political consequences of climate change, see Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats (Oxford, 2010)
36 Charles Fritz, ‘Disasters and Mental Health: Therapeutic Principles Drawn from Disaster Studies’, (Historical and Comparative Disaster Series 10) University of Delaware Disaster Research Center (1996), pp. 55, 57, 63.
37 Ibid., pp. 23–4.
38 Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, cited in Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (New York, 2009), pp. 107–9p. 162.