“The Politics of Economic Disaster” by Immanuel Wallerstein Every day, I read another economist, journalist, or government official opining on how best to achieve economic recovery in this country or that. Needless to say, the remedies all contradict each other. But almost all of these pundits seem to me to live in fantasyland. They actually [...]

Humphrey McQueen provides two extracts from Marx’s A Contribution to the critique of Political Economy, (1859), 150 years ago. This first passage has been edited to break up Marx’s single sentence into four. A danger in this sub-editing is that his interconnections will be lost. That risk is greater in breaking up sentences than paragraphs. [...]

This sequence of Humphrey McQueen’s responses to the crisis in the accumulation of capital has stressed the need to return to Marx’s critique of political economy. Even people who accept the relevance of Capital to the exploitation of labour wonder whether those insights can help us to penetrate a financial crisis. That skepticism is reasonable [...]

One mark of the crisis in the accumulation of capital is that second-hand copies of Marx’s Capital are nowhere to befound . Those fortunate to have our own sets are taking them down, and opening them, perhaps for the first time. How many of those who start to read at the beginning are likely get [...]

Humphrey McQueen on Crisis! What crisis? Shortly after the Austrian aeronautical engineer Ludwig Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge in 1911, he drove Bertrand Russell to distraction by refusing to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room. These days, I find myself sharing Russell’s frustration because so many socialist grouplets are unable to focus [...]