Recognizing and understanding the seminal role that the Kennedy tax cuts and those 15 years of inflation played in the cascade of deregulation and class entrenchment that put us where we are is necessary for plotting appropriate course corrections, but it is not sufficient.Identification of the...

This paper presents an overview of different models which explain financial crises, with the aim of understanding economic developments during and possibly after the Great Recession. In the first part approaches based on efficient markets and rational expectations hypotheses are analyzed, which...

The paper introduces the notion of different methods of calculating and analysing profitability as signatures of capitalism at different stages of development. Its point of departure is Bryer's thesis of the capitalist mentality, which is subject to theoretical and empirical critique and...

In his book, the Political Economy of Growth (1957), and in an article he wrote several years earlier (1953), the economist Paul A. Baran noted how in an economic system characterized by a hierarchy of classes and where economic and political power are concentrated in the top class of such a...

Like previous economic systems, the capitalist system may be exposed to built-in mechanisms leading to its demise. One serious candidate to ruin capitalism is the practice of companies repurchasing their own shares. In this paper we extend the famous Warren Buffet analogy on CEO Fred Futile to...

Portuguese Abstract: Segundo a perspetiva Marxista tradicional – do chamado "materialismo dialético" – toda e qualquer realidade (natural, física, social, etc.) é em si mesma contraditória, dialética, devendo a ciência ser baseada nessa mesma dialética "materialista". Lucio Colletti,...

In this paper, I investigate the phenomenon of long waves of capitalist development from two perspectives. First, I look for evidence of long waves of economic growth taking the dates for turning points of long waves from the historical literature (Mandel, 1995). Using historical data for 20...

Kalyal Sanayal's work on postcolonial capitalism has been influential in many strands of critical social theory. In this brief note, I investigate three key components of his argument and find them wanting. In particular, I show that the evolution of land ownership in India does not support the...

This paper contends that Marx develops in Volume III of Capital an incisive conceptual framework in which excessive credit creation, indebtedness and speculation play a critical and growing role in the reproduction of social capital on an extended basis; however, given the decentralised and...

An economic crisis in capitalism is a deep and prolonged interruption of the economy-wide circuit of capital. Crises emerge from within the logic of capitalism's operation, and are manifestations of the inherently contradictory process of capital accumulation. The Marxist tradition...