Greek Capitalism in Crisis: Marxist Analyses

263 Pages·2014·1.16 MB·English

by  Stavros Mavroudeas

Greek Capitalism in Crisis
Despite the depth of the Greek crisis, the exorbitant burdens placed upon the
working people and the massive popular resistance movement to capitalist pol-
icies, there is a definite lack of consistently Marxist analyses of the Greek
problem. International debates regarding the Greek crisis have been dominated
by orthodox (Neoclassical and neo-K eynesian) approaches.
The heterodox side of these debates has been occupied by Radical Political
Economy approaches (usually radical post- Keynesian or Marxo- Keynesian per-
spectives). Moreover, they are dominated by the financialisation thesis which is
quite alien to Marxism, neglects the sphere of production and professes that the
global crisis is simply a financial crisis that has nothing to do with ‘real’ accu-
mulation and the profit rate.
This book argues that by emphasising the sphere of production and profit-
ability, classical Marxist analysis better explains the Greek crisis than its
orthodox and heterodox competitors. The contributors present critiques of the
prevalent approaches and offer studies of the Greek crisis that use the method-
ology and the analytical and empirical tools of classical Marxist Political
Economy. In particular, it is shown that the Greek crisis was caused by falling
profitability and the ensuing overaccumulation crisis. The ‘broad unequal
exchange’ existing between the euro- centre and the euro- periphery contributed
to Greek capital’s falling profitability. This book enriches the debate about the
Greek economic crisis by demonstrating the insights that can be drawn by con-
sidering the Marxist alternative to the dominant mainstream and heterodox
approaches.
Stavros Mavroudeas is Professor of Political Economy at the University of
Macedonia, Greece.
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