Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance

✍ Scribed by David McNally

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 249
• Series: Spectre
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Investigating the global financial meltdown as the first systemic crisis of the neoliberal stage of capitalism, this analysis argues that—far from having ended—the crisis has ushered in a period of worldwide economic and political turbulence. In developing an account of the crisis as rooted in fundamental features of capitalism, this study challenges the view that capitalism's source lies in financial deregulation, and highlights the emergence of new patterns of world inequality and new centers of accumulation, particularly in East Asia, and the profound economic instabilities these have produced. This original account of the “financialization” of the world economy during this period explores the intricate connections between international financial markets and new forms of debt and dispossession. Analyzing the massive intervention of the world’s central banks to stave off another Great Depression, this study shows that while averting a complete meltdown, this intervention also laid the basis for recurring crises for poor and working class people: job loss, increased poverty and inequality, and cuts in social programs. Taking a global view of these processes, exposing the damage inflicted on countries in the Global South, as well as the intensification of racism and attacks on migrant workers, this book also traces new patterns of social and political resistance—from housing activism and education struggles, to mass strikes and protests in Martinique, Guadeloupe, France, and Puerto Rico—as indicators of the potential for building anticapitalist opposition to the damage that neoliberal capitalism is inflicting on the lives of millions.

✦ Table of Contents

Praise for Global Slump......Page 2
Copyright......Page 5
Dedication......Page 6
Contents......Page 8
Preface and Acknowledgements
......Page 10
Introduction: The Mutating Crisis of Global Capitalism......Page 14
chapter one: The Great Panic of 2008......Page 26
chapter two:
The Day the Music Died: Three Decades of Neoliberalism......Page 38
chapter three:
Manic Depression: Capitalism and its Recurring Crises......Page 74
chapter four:
Financial Chaos: Money, Credit, and Instability in Late Capitalism......Page 98
chapter five:
Debt, Discipline, and Dispossession: Race, Class, and the Global Slump......Page 126
chapter six:
Toward a Great Resistance?......Page 159
Conclusion
......Page 196
Glossary
......Page 208
Notes
......Page 210
Index
......Page 240