What drives capital’s global crises?

Mike Macnair reviews: Guglielmo Carchedi, 'Behind the crisis: Marx’s dialectics of value and knowledge', Haymarket Books, 2012, pp303, £20

This book’s subtitle is a better guide to its contents than the main title: it is primarily about the philosophical underpinnings of Marx’s critique of political economy, and only secondarily - in part of chapter two and in chapter three - about the immediate origins or explanation of the ‘great crisis’ of 2008-09 and the relative stagnation which has followed it in the central imperialist countries. This point is not meant as a criticism - or, rather, at most it is a criticism of its marketing. It is an important work which should be widely read, though not uncritically.

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