Minsky’s theory of financial instability helps clarify how Marxist theory can explain the highly financialised capitalism of today, and the crisis which started in 2008. The advanced economies currently have high realised profits in the productive sector and lagging rates of investment. Shareholder pressures encourage corporate strategies which focus on stock-market ratings and M&A operations, less on productive investment. Tax evasion and the build-up of reserve cash piles by corporations have contributed to a global surplus of what Marx called loanable (...) capital. This surplus has been augmented by the increasing inequality of personal wealth ownership and, in the international economy by, large current-account surpluses. The results include: huge profits for the financial system; low interest rates; recurrent boom and bust in asset markets; the fuelling of huge increases in household and government debt; and the combination of instability and stagnation which results from an excess supply of loanable capital. (shrink)

This article revisits an historic exchange between two black ex-communists, Harold Cruse and Harry Haywood, a debate that prefigured many of the central contradictions of the black-power era. Their exchange followed Cruse’s influential 1962 essay forStudies on the Left, ‘Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American’, which declared that the American Negro was a ‘subject of domestic colonialism’. Written against the prevailing liberal integrationist commitments of the civil-rights movement, his essay called for black economic and political independence, and inspired many of the (...) younger activists who would give birth to the black-power movement. In a series of essays for the Bay Area black radical journalSoulbook, Haywood criticised Cruse’s mishandling of class politics among blacks, and his retreat from anti-capitalism. This forgotten episode is important on its own terms, for what it says about the character and limitations of left-political thinking during the sixties, and equally for understanding and contesting those commonsensical notions of African-American public life in our times which too often remain rooted in the vanished social context and political realities of the twentieth-century racial ghetto. (shrink)