Neil Davidson died in May of 2020 after being diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor the previous fall. His tragically early death, at the age of 62, robbed the English-speaking world—and Scotland in particular—of an original and provocative Marxist intellectual and militant. Neil was a true working-class auto-didact—with little formal academic training, he made crucial contributions to contemporary Marxism. His intellectual interests ranged from the origins of Scottish capitalism and nationalism, through the “bourgeois revolutions,” to various aspects of socialist politics over the past three decades. While we often disagreed on theoretical and historical issues, our shared commitment to the tradition of revolutionary socialism from below—of working-class self-organization and self-emancipation—provided the basis for what many saw as a model of comradely debate.
What Was Neoliberalism?1 is the first book-length work by Davidson to be published posthumously. His friends and comrades, Jamie Allinson and Steve Edwards, lightly edited this near finished manuscript, which is an ambitious attempt to grapple with the origins and historical evolution of neoliberalism. Davidson refused to engage in speculation about the future of neoliberalism, “whether the future of capitalism will involve a further mutation of neoliberalism, or the replacement of neoliberalism by a new method of capitalist organization or—however distant this may seem—the overthrow of the entire system.” Instead, he focusses on “what neoliberalism was before 2008 and, equally importantly, what it is not.” (5-6) Davidson sees neoliberalism encompassing three distinct but interrelated phenomena. First, it is an ideological discourse, first elaborated by Central European economists hostile to both Marx and Keynes in the 1930s, and revived by the “Chicago School” in the 1970s. Second, it is a strategy state managers adopted in response to the capitalist crisis that began in the mid-1960s. These policies were first deployed by the Chilean military dictatorship in the 1970s, then adopted in the UK, United States, and New Zealand in the 1980s, before becoming capitalist state policy across the globe. Finally, neoliberalism is analyzed as a distinct “era of capitalism.” (7)
Davidson begins his discussion of the ideological foundations of neoliberalism with a spirited defense of the best-known figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Smith. Despite the attempt by neoliberal ideologues to appropriate his heritage, Davidson argues that:
When Smith attacks unproductive labor, he is not making some timeless critique of state employees, but thinking specifically about Highland clan retainers. When he opposes monopolies, he was not issuing a prophetic warning against the nationalization of industries in the twentieth century, but criticizing those companies which relied for their market position on the possession of exclusive royal charters in the eighteenth… [H]e did not see the market as a quasi-mystical institution that should be made to penetrate every aspect of social life, but rather as a limited mechanism for liberating humanity’s economic potential from feudal and absolutist stagnation. (19)
He highlights Smith’s deep suspicions of “businessmen and their conspiracies against the public” and his description of pin manufacturing, foretelling the degradation of labor under capitalism where “the efficiency of the division of labor” goes hand in hand with “the soul-destroying repetition that awaited the new class of wage laborers.” (20)
Instead, the roots of neoliberalism are found in what Marx called “vulgar economics”—neo-classical economics and its fetish of the market and its independence. For the neo-classical economists, a strong state was necessary to reproduce the legal-juridical conditions for the operation of the law of value. The state became a problem when it “acted as a rival means of economic organization which could threaten the existence of private capital.” (22) During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Hayek led a group of central European economists who opposed the trend toward greater capitalist-state intervention in the capitalist economy. They targeted Keynesian attempts to smooth the business cycle and contain growing working-class militancy with limited nationalizations, indicative planning and an expansion of the welfare state. However, it was not the power of “free market ideas” (54) that led state managers across the globe to abandon Keynesian for neoliberal state policies in the late 1970s, but the long-term impact of the globalization of capitalist production in the post-World War II period. Sharpening inter-capitalist competition, especially after the onset of the crisis of profitability in the mid-1960s, and the growth of cross-border production and finance pushed capitalists and state managers away from Keynesianism toward lower taxes, less regulation, and privatization as a way of enhancing the competitiveness and profitability of their capitals in the world economy.
Davidson’s treatment of the emergence and consolidation of neoliberalism is one of the high points of the book. Rather than a fully worked out set of capitalist state policies adopted in a “once and for all” manner across the capitalist world, neoliberal regimes emerged in a piece-meal manner through the late 1970s and 1980s, before being consolidated and transformed in the 1990s and 2000s. Davidson labels the early adopters of neoliberal policies in the UK, United States, and New Zealand the “regimes of reorientation.” Neoliberalism emerged as a series of pragmatic policy innovations by state managers facing the deepening crisis of profitability. The permanent bureaucracy of the capitalist state had to negotiate a path acceptable to capitalist classes united behind policies that would discipline the unruly working-class movements of the 1960s and 1970s, but deeply divided over state policies to restore profitability that would necessarily bankrupt the least competitive capitalists. Under the leadership of figures like Thatcher and Reagan, politicians ready to fight for policies “with absolute conviction, if necessary, against individual members of the capitalist class themselves” (68), state managers first adapted “monetarist” policies that sharply raised interest rates to discipline both labor and the least competitive sectors of the capitalist class. They then launched a series of successful battles against the labor movement—Reagan’s smashing of the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981 and Thatcher’s war against the miners in 1984-1985. Finally, they promoted the establishment of new plants and industries in regions of the global North “with low or nonexistent levels of unionization and … prevent[ed] as far as possible the culture of membership becoming established.” (78) In the wake of these defeats, the labor movement was unable to press for higher wages or improved working conditions when rising profitability and renewed growth tightened labor-markets in the early 1990s. The result was a continuous rise in the rate of surplus-value, the rate of exploitation, that sustained profitability until the crisis of 2008.
Having crushed the disruptive working-class struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, “vanguard neoliberalism” effectively transformed social-democracy from parties of pro-working-class reform within capitalism to parties of continued deregulation, low taxes, and the dismantling of the welfare state. By the early 1990s, they had become social liberal parties. In the first phase of neoliberalism, right-wing figures like Reagan and Thatcher envisioned a world where people were “free in relation to economic activity, but unfree in relation to social morality and state legality.” (95) In the second phase they were replaced by ostensibly “left” figures like Clinton and Blair who combined “fiscal conservatism” with a “cultural liberalism” that gave a “place at the table” to “respectable” women, non-whites, and queer folks, while continuing their war against labor and the poor.
Davidson draws on the work of one of his prime polemical targets in the debates on the origins of capitalism, Ellen Meiksins Wood, to grasp the deepening transformation of the “democratic” form of capitalist rule under social liberalism. Wood argued that capitalist “representative democracy,” from its origins in the late eighteenth century, abandoned substantive democracy—with its bothersome majority rule—in favor of elected government that ensure the “rule of law” which protects capitalist social property relations.2 Under neoliberalism, Davidson highlights how more and more elements of state economic and social policy were removed from the purview of “politicians who might be expected to deploy it for electoral purposes.”3 (92) Unchallenged by a trade union officialdom suffering from a “structural reluctance to engage in official all-out action” (90), social liberalism combined “social or liberal democratic rhetoric” with “maintaining and even extending the essential components of neoliberalism.” (93) For Davidson, the “normalization of neoliberalism” as “the framework within which politics would henceforth be conducted”—a world in which “there was no alternative”—was accomplished not by Reagan and Thatcher, but by Clinton, Blair, and Obama.
Davidson highlights three results of the victory and consolidation of neoliberalism in the global North—the “boom economies” of 1982-2008, the growing cultural crisis of “broken societies,” and the growth of “market states.” We will examine the limits of Davidson’s analysis of the global economy in the twenty-five years preceding the global recession of 2008 below. Neoliberalism exacerbated the cultural dilemmas of late capitalism identified by conservative ideologues Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol. For Bell and Kristol, capitalism’s promotion of economic individualism led to a “disinhibition in social and cultural life, which the moral and legal codes of bourgeois society were designed to repress.” (127) How could neoliberalism reconcile its “aspiration to create a population which behaves as sovereign individual consumers in the market place” with the need for “obedient wage laborers in the workplace, and subordinate mass citizens before the state.” (126) The failure of neoliberalism to deliver rising living standards, while dismantling the post-war welfare state, only exacerbated “poverty and inequality on the one hand, and of the illnesses, family breakdown, and crime which they tend to bring on the other.” (129) Neoliberal deregulation and austerity reinforced most people’s sense of being powerless in the face of economic disruption and instability, outside of individually “getting ahead” in the competitive market.
Two cultural tropes attempted to make sense of the dystopian world of neo-liberalism. On the one hand, there was a proliferation of different social identifiers and the development of a “progressive” neoliberalism that was “multicultural” and “inclusive”—at least of those women, people of color, and queer folks who were college educated and “played by the rules.” On the other, there was a rise of racism and xenophobia that saw social decay as the result of the “bad character” of non-whites and “illegal” immigrants. Individual social behavior was blamed for the growing cultural crisis, scapegoating “the Intruder, characteristically an asylum seeker or illegal immigrant, who adds to the ranks of the Criminals while being housed and protected by the Incompetents, enslaved as they are to doctrines of Political Correctness.” (133) Put another way, the growing crisis of lived experience under neo-liberalism gave rise to both liberal identity politics, with its belief in “equal opportunity” for all, and reactionary populism, which blamed both “cultural elites” and the criminal, the incompetent and foreign intruders for the “decline of the middle classes.”
Neoliberalism also produced a crisis of capitalist political rule. Davidson rejects both mainstream and “radical” claims that neoliberalism was a “retreat” of the state. Instead, the capitalist state apparatuses and state expenditures have expanded since the 1980s. Most of the institutional growth was in the repressive apparatuses of the capitalist state—the militarization of police forces and greater restrictions on strike actions and public protest—“required to deal with the social problems neoliberalism generated in practice.” (145) State expenditures have expanded as well, with military spending and subsidies to private firms “too big to fail” in the lead. State spending on social welfare has also increased, but with universal, direct state support for the reproduction of labor power curtailed. Instead, individualized households have the primary responsibility for children, the elderly, the disabled, and the ill. Private charities and NGOs, using state resources, monitor the “success” of these atomized efforts to deal with social problems and provide greatly reduced, highly conditional services and support.
Neoliberalism has also made the capitalist state’s role in establishing “the interests of capital as a whole” more difficult. Historically, individual capitalists have been generally uninterested in their broader class interests—they are focused on their individual struggle to survive the battle of capitalist competition. State managers—in particular, the permanent, unelected state officialdom—have historically been the main cadre negotiating the divisions among “the band of warring brothers” to establish a ruling-class consensus. According to Davidson:
…in the developed West at least, neoliberal regimes are increasingly displaying an uncritical adherence to the short-term wishes of particular business interest. Nor is this the only emergent problem: the increasingly narrow parameters of neoliberal politics, where choice is restricted to “social” rather than “economic” issues, has encouraged the emergence of far-right parties, usually fixated on questions of migration, which have proved enormously divisive in working-class communities, but whose policies are in other respects by no means in the interests of capital. (157-158)
State managers—facing narrowing constraints on state economic policies, and the “politicization” of formerly “non-political” state offices with more private sector appointees to these positions—avoid “any policies that might incur corporate displeasure” (160).
As the policies under the control of elected officials constrict, the electorate has become more and more disproportionately middle class and increasingly politically polarized. On one side is a successful, college-educated layer of professionals and managers, who embrace both cultural diversity and economic freedom, providing electoral support for social liberalism. On the other are economically squeezed and precarious traditional small business people and lower-level supervisors and technicians, who embrace a right-wing populism that blames both “globalizing elites” and deviant racial, gender, and sexual minorities for their declining position. The latter are increasingly dominating the parties of the traditional right and pose a potential threat to the stability of neoliberalism.
Davidson concludes that neoliberalism’s current crisis—with no visible alternative to stabilize capitalist rule on the horizon—is the result of its success. Neoliberalism was “too successful as a mode of capitalist regulation… [and has] finally brought about the situation which Schumpeter feared, where creative destruction has no limits or boundaries.” (174) Faced with a weak working-class movement, a rising tide of right-wing middle-class populism, and a weakening of state economic planning agencies, Davidson sees no Keynesian—or, more accurately, military-imperial Keynesian4—strategy to reestablish capitalist profitability and competitiveness in the short to medium term. Only a new rise of working-class struggle can stem the tide of continuing neoliberal attacks and the threat of right-wing populism. Davidson joins Kim Moody5 and others in rejecting claims that a wholesale migration of manufacturing to the global South or the rise of precarious employment—both of which are greatly exaggerated in most mainstream and “radical” accounts of neoliberalism—are responsible for continued relative quiescence in the working classes of the global North. Instead, he correctly identifies the disorganization of the militant minority of the class-—the cadre of workplace and community activists who remain active between lulls in struggle and who have a social vision and political strategy to lead successful struggles in an upsurge.
The strength of What Was Neoliberalism? is its analysis of the origins and consolidation of neoliberalism as a capitalist political program, and its impact on capitalist culture and politics. However, it ultimately fails to make the case that neoliberalism constitutes a distinct “era” or “phase” of capitalism. Davidson attempts to find a middle ground in the debate surrounding “stages” or “phases” of capitalism. On the one hand, he rejects claims by the French “Regulation School”6 that each “regime of accumulation” has distinct laws of motion and crises tendencies. He is clear that capitalist crises “all have the same cause, in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and take the same form, in the overproduction of commodities.” (8) On the other, he rejects criticisms of the “Regulationists” by such diverse Marxists as Robert Brenner, Mark Glick, and Anwar Shaikh,7 for focusing “on the underlying exploitative and competitive relationships of the system, rejecting attempts at periodization as being focused on mere epiphenomena.” Instead, he asserts that:
… capitalism has never existed in a pure form, operating according to the model established by Marx in Capital, and this is why we attempt to identify successive stages of capitalist development. (11)
For Davidson, all crises, while having similar causes, are “historical events, the trajectories of which are determined by—among other factors—levels of working-class organization and resistance, the availability and strength of countervailing tendencies to that of the rate of profit to fall, and the capacity and ability of states to intervene.” (8)
Davidson outlines the three phases of capitalism that preceded neoliberalism. The first was “classical capitalism,” ostensibly analyzed in Marx’s Capital, which goes into crisis in 1873. The second phase sees the formation of monopolistic corporations in the global North and the expansion of a specifically capitalist colonization into the global South, which formed the basis of the “monopoly capitalist” or “imperialist” phase of capitalism analyzed by Lenin and Bukharin.8 Finally, there is the post-World War II consolidation of “state capitalism” buoyed by the Cold War “permanent arms economy.” State capitalism took its most complete form in the USSR, China, and other Stalinist states, and produced a social-democratic or liberal form in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, and “hybrid forms… in the non-Stalinist areas of the former colonial world.” (12) Following the work of Michael Kidron, and Chris Harman9 and others in the British International Socialist tradition, Davidson rejects claims that Keynesian demand management was primarily responsible for the extraordinary growth of the capitalist world economy during the “Golden Age” between 1945 and 1970. Instead, it was the growth of “unproductive” investment in armaments that slowed the rise of the organic composition of capital, supplemented with the growth of mass consumption and the transformation of agriculture that reduced the value of labor-power.
The crisis of “state capitalism” that began in the mid-1960s set the stage for the fourth phase, neoliberal capitalism. Davidson assessment of the impact of neoliberalism on capitalist profitability and accumulation from 1983 through the 2008 recession is ambiguous. On the one hand, he criticizes many of his co-thinkers in the British International Socialist tradition for ignoring the recovery of profitability after the recession of the early 1980s. On the other hand, he expresses doubts about the “boom economies” of the following twenty-five years. While recognizing that the 1980-1982 recession did, like any recession, cause “the destruction of some capitals and the rationalization and retooling of those which survived” (112), he emphasizes short-term factors that maintained turbulent growth in the pursuing decades. Like Robert Brenner,10 he points to financial and real-estate speculation as the main drivers of volatile cycles of boom and bust. Davidson also agrees with Brenner that the increase in the rate of exploitation was based solely on the intensification of the labor-process and not technological innovation. He draws on David Harvey’s notion of “accumulation by dispossession”11 to highlight the violent processes that brought various natural resources (land, water, forests, minerals) into the orbit of capitalist accumulation, and the privatization of state-owned industry. Finally, he points to the role of the explosive growth of the Chinese industrial economy in sustaining the neoliberal expansion.
Davidson’s economic analysis suffers from a number of theoretical and empirical problems. First, he—like many on the Marxist left—views Capital as either an analysis of the phase of “competitive capitalism” or as an “ideal type” of capitalism. These claims fundamentally confuse Marx’s method and his analysis of competition with those of neo-classical economics. Marx’s Capital is not an “ideal type” of capitalism, which never “corresponds” to actual “historical capitalism.” Instead, Marx’s method involves the production of scientific abstractions that capture the necessary relations and processes of capitalism as a distinct form of social organization. Put another way, Marx identifies the invariant relations and processes that characterize capitalism’s specific dynamics. While the relations of exploitation and competition remain unchanged, the institutional framework for capitalist accumulation—particular forms of the capitalist state, the different forms of organization of capital and labor—vary tremendously from one capitalist society to another. As Anwar Shaikh puts it “capitalism’s sheath mutates constantly, but its core remains the same.”12
The notion of “perfect competition” in neo-classical economics is an ideal type. It exists only when a large number of small, labor-intensive, “price taking” firms quickly adopt uniform techniques, wage and profit rates. Any “deviation” from this idealization is oligopoly—a form of “imperfect competition” that creates obstacles to capital mobility, different techniques, and higher than average profits and wages. Perfect competition is an ideological construction, it idealizes capitalist competition as the basis for an efficient and just economic order. By contrast “real capitalist competition,”13 from the birth of capitalism in sixteenth century English agriculture to contemporary transnational corporations, has never resembled perfect competition. Capitalist competition involves constant technological innovation, taking the form of the increasing mechanization of production. As Marx commented, capital wages the competitive battle with “the artillery of fixed capital.” Older investments in fixed capital, even if they no longer allow a particular firm to reduce unit costs and raise its profit margins and rates, cannot be abandoned immediately in favor of new and more efficient machinery. As a result, competition and accumulation do not homogenize labor-process and profit and wage rates, but constantly differentiate these conditions of production. While the dream world of perfect competition produces uniform and mutually beneficial outcomes for all competitors, real competition is “antagonistic by nature and turbulent in nature” and “it is as different from so-called perfect competition as war is from ballet.”14 As Shaikh and his co-thinkers have demonstrated, real competition has produced amazing regularities in the historical dynamics of capitalism across societies over the past two hundred and fifty years—including the competitively driven turbulent equalization of profit rates between industries.
Nor does the notion of “state capitalism” as a distinctive phase of capitalism, or the “permanent arms economy” as an explanation of the post-World War II boom, withstand critical scrutiny.15 The notion that there was an historic “fusion” of private capital and the state, beginning during the first World War and consolidated after 1945, tends to ignore the separation of capitalist political rule—institutionalized in the capitalist state—and capitalist accumulation throughout the history of the capitalist mode of production.16 Capitalist state “economic interventions” are always limited to policies that attempt to mobilize counter-tendencies to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.17 As capitalism developed and larger masses of fixed capital were deployed, putting downward pressure on the rate of profit, capitalist state institutions mobilizing counter-tendencies to declining profits multiplied in the post-war era. However, the state institutions remained “relatively autonomous” from capital accumulation-—ultimately unable to prevent a renewed crisis of profitability in the 1960s and 1970s.18
Nor does the “permanent arms economy” explain the dynamism of accumulation in the “golden age.” Since the 1960s, various Marxian economists challenged the notion that investment in arms production slowed the growth of the organic composition of capital and boosted profitability.19 A recent study by Adem Yavuz Elveren20 found that increased military expenditures tend to depress employment, and had contradictory effects on profitability—boosting U.S. profits rates between 1963 and 1980, but having no effect after 1980.
The roots of the exceptional recovery of profitability and accumulation during the “golden age” was neither the “fusion of state and capital,” nor the growth of arms expenditures. Instead, it was the massive—and unprecedented—destruction of fixed capital, first during the Great Depression of 1929-1931 and then the Second World War. The radical reduction in the capital stock produced a sharp rise in profitability that sustained the unique period of capitalist growth from 1945 to 1970.
Finally, there is significant evidence, in particular in the work of Michael Roberts and Shaikh,21 to demonstrate that the rate and mass of profit rose from 1983 through the early 2000s. The recovery was founded in the elimination of a significant number of uncompetitive firms, significantly lowering the organic composition of capital, during the sharp recession of 1980-1982 and the wave of “mergers and acquisitions” in the 1980s. The resulting rise in profitability sparked new investment in fixed capital, including the introduction of new, more capital-intensive technology. The historic weakening of unions and other working-class organizations suppressed the rise of real wages and allowed capital to intensify the labor-process, allowing profits to remain high through the 1990s and early 2000s. The “neo-liberal boom” was, in fact, similar to the capitalist expansion of 1894 to 1914, marked by work intensification, relative wage-stagnation and “free market” policies in most capitalist states.
In sum, What Was Neoliberalism? displays Neil Davidson’s incredible breadth of knowledge and theoretical acumen. His analyses of the ideological origins and political evolution of neoliberalism are both original and insightful. Despite the weaknesses of his economic analysis, the book is a crucial contribution to the Marxist understanding of the recent history of capitalism and the roots of the current world political and economic crisis. It is essential readings for all of us who are seeking to respond to this crisis and build a working-class response to the continued capitalist offensive and rise of middle-class reaction.
Notes
1. Neil Davidson, What Was Neoliberalism? Studies in the Most Recent Phase of Capitalism, 1973-2008 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023).
2. “Labor and Democracy, Ancient and Modern” and “The Demos versus ‘We, the People’: From Ancient to Modern Conceptions of Citizenship,” in Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
3. Davidson argues that William Burroughs’ satire of politics in the 1950s “now seem[s] uncomfortably close to reality”: “The forms of democracy are scrupulously enforced on the Island. There is a Senate and Congress who carry out endless sessions discussing garbage disposal and outhouse inspections, the only two questions over which they have jurisdiction.”
4. Ashley Smith, “Trapped in the Democratic Party: The Left, Bidenomics, and Socialist Strategy,” Tempest, August 21, 2023.
5. On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of the Class War (Haymarket Books, 2017), Parts I and II.
6. Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience (Verso Books, 2015).
7. Robert Brenner and Mark Glick, “The Regulation Approach: Theory and History” New Left Review I/188 (July-August 1991); Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp.724-740.
8. V.I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916); N. Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy (1915).
9. Michael Kidron, “A Permanent Arms Economy,” International Socialism Journal 1:28 (Spring 1967); Chris Harman, Explaining the Crisis: A Marxist Reappraisal (Bookmarks, 1984), Ch. 3.
10. The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005 (Verso Books, 2006).
11. “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession,” in L. Panitch and C. Leys (eds.), The New Imperial Challenge: Socialist Register 2004 (Monthly Review Press, 2003).
12. Shaikh, Capitalism, p. 726.
13. Shaikh, Capitalism, Part II.
14. Shaikh, Capitalism, p. 14.
15. We will leave aside the question of whether the Soviet Union and other similar societies were capitalist. See John Fantham and Moshe Machover, The Century of the Unexpected: A New Analysis of Soviet Type Societies (London: Big Flame Publications, 1979) for an alternative to critical Marxist theories of the Soviet Union as either state capitalist or some form of transitional society.
16. Ellen Meiksins, Wood, “The Separation of the ‘Economic’ from the ‘Political’ in Capitalism,” in Democracy Against Capitalism (Verso, 2016).
17. Joaquim Hirsch, “The State Apparatus and Social Reproduction: Elements of a Theory of the Capitalist State,” in J. Holloway and S. Picciotto (eds.), State and Capital: A Marxist Debate (Edward Arnold, 1978).
18. K. Moody, “Alex Callinicos on State and Capital,” Against the Current 52 (October 1994), and “A Reply to Callinicos on the State and Capital” Against the Current, 56 (May-June 1995).
19. Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975), Chapter 9; Paul Mattick, “Economics of War Production,” American Socialist (April 1959); Paul Mattick, “Arms and Capital,” International Socialism Journal 1:34 (Autumn 1968).
20. The Economics of Military Spending: A Marxist Perspective (Routledge, 2019).
21. Michael Roberts, The Long Depression (Haymarket Books, 2016), Chs. 1 and 4; Shaikh, “The First Great Depression of the 21st Century,” in L. Panitch, G. Albo and V. Chibber (eds.), The Crisis This Time: Socialist Register 2011 (Monthly Review Press, 2010).
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