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WRITTEN IN THE AFTERMATH of the 2008 banking crash and published in 2012, Andrew Kliman’s The Failure of Capitalist Production adds to the extensive literature on American decline.1 Kliman identifies the way that profits have tended to fall relative to investments since the 1970s and also the diminishing rate of investment itself (the latter, he says, a consequence of the former)—a period of underaccumulation over the period from the mid-seventies to the present day, around 40 years, or longer than most people have been alive. [Read More]

SPEAKING FOR THE International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) at the Left Forum, Jason Wright recently observed, “It seems for a while now that it has been the desire of Platypus to have a three-way conversation be tween New Left Maoism (as one of the more palatable faces of Stalinism), orthodox Trotskyism,” and Platypus themselves, who tend to put speakers in situations significantly less comfortable than their catechistic internal meetings. At a roundtable with the IBT, Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), and Platypus, it would be difficult to discern which group has done a larger disservice to the workers’ movement. [Read More]

LENIN STATED, infamously perhaps, that Marxists aimed to overcome capitalism “on the basis of capitalism itself.” This was in the context of horrors of not only industrial exploitation but also and especially of war: WWI. Lenin was not, as he might be mistaken to be, merely advocating so-called “war communism” or statist capitalism.1 No. Lenin recognized state capitalism as the advancing of the contradiction of capitalism. By contrast, after Lenin, there was state capitalism, but no active political consciousness of its contradiction. [Read More]