The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession
Andrew Kliman - Pluto Press, 2011
The recent financial crisis and Great
Recession have been analyzed endlessly in the mainstream and academia, but 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 and that
free-market policies failed to reverse the decline. The fall in profitability
led to sluggish investment and economic growth, mounting debt problems,
desperate attempts of governments to fight these problems by piling up even more
debt – and ultimately to 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 existing wealth, something not seen since the
Depression of the 1930s
