E-Book Overview
The starting point for the collection of articles presented here is that we can find the answers we need in the classical canon of Marxist political economy.Thus, this anthology seeks to do link together two things: the contradictions of the global economic system and the
developing tensions and frictions in international relations with the rise of new global powers.
Marcus Lehner offers an outline of Karl Marx’s theories of money, banking and finance and shows how it can provide a compelling account of what caused the great financial crisis. Updating an earlier analysis written for the German Marxist journal Revolutionärer Marxismus he applies the theory to the American banking system.
Luke Cooper surveys the work of two recent high profile Marxist theories of imperialism developed by David Harvey and Alex Callinicos.
And Keith Spencer makes a case study analysis of a ‘Great Power’ that was at the centre of the global financial whirlwind: Britain.
E-Book Content
MARX, MONEY AND THE MODERN WORLD FINANCE CAPITAL AND IMPERIALISM TODAY
Contents 1. Theories of late capitalist development: Harvey and Callinicos on contemporary imperialism Luke Cooper 1.1 Imperialism and the post-Cold War world 1.2 The long shadow of the classical legacies: contesting the nature of the system 1.3 The classical tradition in imperialism theory today 1.4 Mechanisms of surplus extract on: parasitism, ‘high finance’ and the system 1.5 Accumulation by dispossession – Harvey on the nature of imperial predation 1.6 Class structure in the imperial heartlands: the ‘labour aristocracy’ 1.7 Finance capital – the evolution of the capital form and imperialism 1.8 History, concepts and analysis: the method of non-deductive concretisation 1.9 Markets, states and ‘the international’: between Nicolai Bukharin and Hannah Arendt
2. Marx, money and modern finance capital Markus Lehner 2.1 Money and the contradictions of capital accumulation 2.2 Money and crisis 2.3 Money as capital 2.4 The long-term tendencies of capital accumulation 2.5 The long-term tendencies and imperialism 2.6 The modification of the average rate of profit in the circulation of capital
3. The formation of finance capital 3.1 Interest-bearing capital 3.2 The many forms of interest 3.3 “Capital value” and employer’s profit 3.4 The accumulation of interest-bearing capital and the formation of fictitious capital 3.5 Derivatives
1 3 5 7 13 19 23 28 30
53 55 57 64 68 70 71
72 72 76 79 82 85
II
Marx, Money and The Modern World - Imperialism and Finance Capital Today
3.6 Commercial credit 3.7 Bank capital and capital credit 3.8 State debt, issuing banks and credit money 3.9 Speculative bubbles
4. Finance and monopoly capitalism 4.1 International capital flows 4.2 Periods of imperialism 4.3 The business cycle and interest-bearing capital 4.4 Finance capital and the long-term tendencies of capital accumulation 4.5 Current developments and the structure of real and money capital accumulation 4.6 Finance market cycles since 1973/74 4.7 Finance capital and socialism
5. Finance capital unleashed: British imperialism today Keith Spencer 5.1 1979-97: Tory onslaught on the working class 5.2 Labour embraces the market: 1987 to 97 5.3 ‘Supply side socialism’ 5.4 New Labour’s policies in practice 5.5 Investment in public services 5.6 Was New Labour successful in restoring the dynamism of British capitalism? 5.7 Did productivity and profits improve? 5.8 Profitability
6. The UK as an imperialist state 6.1 The rise and rise of British monopolies 6.2 The importance of capital flows 6.3 The City of London and the export of capital 6.4 Imperialism and the working class 6.5 The sources of profit in the finance industry 6.6 Labour and the economy 6.7 Long-term contradictions
88 90 95