economics

Part three of this series was published in 2005, two years or so before the great financial crash when the economic pundits were lauding the move away from manufacture to 'business and financial services'.

The article here, the first in a series on what was then dubbed the "new economy", originally appeared in the CWO's political journal, Revolutionary Perspectives, in 2005.

The world economy is in poor shape and the American economy is in even worse condition. The 2008 crisis has not been resolved and many analysts fear a new financial explosion. Capital continues to stay clear of investment in production and is trying to recover without running up more debts. Company returns are low, profit rates are decreasing. Capital is moving more and more into speculation. It is the same old situation, except that the rescue costs of the previous crisis cannot be repeated in the next crisis. The sound of war can be heard in the distance, accompanied by the rising threat of a new, catastrophic barbarism.

This critique by the German Marxist group GegenStandpunkt traces back the logical errors that marginalism allows itself in its reasoning, and shows how its tautologies become increasingly crass in the development from the theories of Menger, Jevons and Walras up to later concepts such as indifference curves.