 | GLOBAL SLUMP
The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance
by David McNally
Global Slump analyzes the global financial meltdown as the first systemic crisis of the neo-liberal stage of capitalism. It argues that - far from having ended - the crisis has ushered in a whole period of worldwide economic and political turbulence. In developing an account of the crisis as rooted in fundamental features of capitalism, it challenges the view that its source lies in financial deregulation.
The book locates the recent meltdown in the intense economic restructuring that marked the recessions of the mid-1970's and early 1980's. It highlights new patterns of world inequality and new centres of accumulation, particularly in East Asia, and the profound economic instabilities these produced. Offering an original account of the "financialization" of the world economy during this period, it explores the intricate connections between international financial markets and new forms of debt and dispossession, particularly in the Global South.
Global Slump also analyses the massive intervention of the world's central banks to stave off another Great Depression, and 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 deep cuts to social programs. Taking a global view of these processes, it exposes the damage inflicted in the Global South, as well as the intensification of racism and attacks on migrant workers. It also traces new patterns of social and political resistance from France to Puerto Rico in housing activism, education struggles, mass strikes and protests in - indicators of the potential for building anti-capitalist opposition to the damage that neo-liberal capitalism is inflicting on the lives of millions.
Praise:
"a scholarly, in depth analysis of our current crisis that never loses sight of its political implications (for them and for us." --Bertell Ollman, Professor, NYU.
"David McNally's tremendously timely book is packed with significant theoretical and practical insights, and offers actually-existing examples of what is to be done. Global Slump urgently details how changes in the capitalist space-economy over the past 25 years, especially in the forms that money takes, have expanded wide-scale vulnerabilities for all kinds of people, and how people fight back. In a word, the problem isn't neo-liberalism -- it's capitalism." --Ruth Wilson Gilmore, USCA.
"Standard accounts of the present crisis blame the excesses of the financial sector, promising that all will be well when the proper financial regulations are in place. McNally's path breaking account goes far deeper. He documents in great detail how the roots of the crisis are found in the systematic failings of capitalism. -Tony Smith, Iowa State
"McNally has developed a powerful interpretation that sheds a mass of new light… This is a superb book." --Robert Brenner
ISBN. 978-0-85036-678-5
176 pages, paperback
Price:£12.95
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