Marxism and the Economic Crisis

Most explanations of the US-led global economic crisis in 2008 argue that it began with a financial meltdown triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis and bursting of the housing bubble from 2006 onwards. This paper, using Marx’s Capital and other Marxist writings, argues the opposite: that financial turmoil was just one symptom of the profound crisis into which the US economy had been sinking for years, transmitted to the rest of the world primarily through the use of the US dollar as world currency, and secondarily through the globalization of the world economy.