Friday, April 17, 2020

Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx

Chris Harman


Haymarket Books, 2010 - Business & Economics - 424 pages

We've been told for years that the capitalist free market is a self-correcting perpetual growth machine in which sellers always find buyers, precluding any major crisis in the system. Then the credit crunch of August 2007 turned into the great crash of September-October 2008, leading one apologist for the system, Willem Buiter, to write of "the end of capitalism as we knew it."

As the crisis unfolded, the world witnessed the way in which the runaway speculation of the "shadow" banking system wreaked havoc on world markets, leaving real human devastation in its wake. Faced with the financial crisis, some economic commentators began to talk of "zombie banks"-financial institutions that were in an "undead state" and incapable of fulfilling any positive function but a threat to everything else. What they do not realize is that twenty-first century capitalism as a whole is a zombie system, seemingly dead when it comes to achieving human goals.


PDF  https://archive.org/details/pdfy-kvzhB4k4AcAT-7iA/page/n1/mode/2up

Contents

Understanding the System Marx and Beyond
19
Marx and His Critics
41
The Dynamics of the System
55
Monopoly War and the State
87
State Spending and the System
121
Capitalism in the 20th Century
141
The Long Boom
161
The End of the Golden
191
The Runaway System
305
The Runaway System and the Future for Humanity
325
Notes
353
Glossary
394
Index
403
143
410
325
420
Copyright

The New Age of Global Instability
227



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