Birmingham in crisis: a city ravaged by austerity-driven unemployment
Although being the 2nd most populated city in the country, Birmingham has consistently ranked low on Westminster’s list of priorities. The ‘2nd city’ label, which was originally coined to boost the area’s reputation nationally and internationally, has only served as an excuse to ignore it.
Big tech and monopolies
Julian Jones examines what the record gains of big tech companies during the COVID-19 pandemic mean for the Marxist understanding of capitalism, monopolisation and crisis in 2020.
9. Capitalist Crisis
One of the key features of capitalism is the recurrence of periodic, systemic crises. These crises are either denied by capitalist economists, attributed to specific circumstances (and thereby taken as an exception rather than a rule) or it is claimed that, actually, the cause of the crisis was state intervention and attempts at planning which have thwarted the logic of the market and deformed an otherwise perfect system.
10. The Falling Rate of Profit
Capitalism, once a progressive force in both social and productive terms, becomes more parasitic and moribund throughout its development. More and more, the social relations of production, crystallised in a social and legal system based on protection of private property, begin to hold back the development of society’s productive forces. More and more, labour is wasted in socially-useless production or financial speculation. Capitalism daily fails the majority of people, impoverishing them in order to make the rich richer.
