Introductions to Finance & the Economy:
- Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey, Video lecture series by David Harvey (City University of New York)
- A House of Cards: from Fantasy Finance to Global Crash, A World to Win
- falseeconomy.org.uk has a blog with accessible analysis of the present economic crisis, and why the cuts wont work.
- D.MacKenzie, An Address in Mayfair, LRB. Introductory article on hedge funds.
- Understanding the jargon behind the banking crisis – What are they talking About? – From the Irish Anarchist Review
- Wildcat Proles Guide to Economics, A guide to the language of economics and recession as it relates to workers, as opposed to abstract market jargon.
- Finance and the Fourth Dimension, Robin Blackburn’s pre-crisis guide to financial capitalism, New Left Review, May 2006
- FT Lexicon – The Financial Times’ dictionary of key economic terms.
- Business dictionary – Also good for definitions
- BBC News – Financial Glossary – one more useful reference point for economic jargon
Writings on the Financial Crisis:
- A (Crumbling) Wall of Money: Financial Bricolage, Derivatives and Power, Nicholas Hildyard (The Corner House), October 2008
- Financialised Capitalism: Crisis and Financial Expropriation, Costas Lapavitsas (SOAS), February 2009
- Eurozone sovereign debt crisis by Research on Money and Finance
- Breaking Up? A Route Out of the Eurozone Crisis, November 2011
- Eurozone: Between Austerity and Default, September 2010
- Begger thyself and thy neighbour, March 2010
- The Great Credit Crash, Martijn Konings (eds.), Verso, 2010
- The Subprime Crisis, New Left Review, Robin Blackburn, March 2009
- Crisis Stories, by Dariush Sokolov. A useful outline of the different narratives used to explain the current crisis.
- An introduction to the history of crisis theories, by Anwar Shaikh. An academic outline of hte major schools of though around crisis.
- Good Times! Bad Times!!, An intoduction to the capitalist crisis and what it means to us. Pamphlet compiled by 56a infoshop, featuring writings from Mario Tronti, Alain Badiou, George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici
- Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed, Paul Mason
- The Crisis of Crises – and what it means for anarchists (part 1 – The financial crisis) (Part 2 – The ecological & infrastructure crises),
- The Enigma of Capital, David Harvey, Oxford University Press, 2010. Also very useful, though written before the present crisis is Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism
- The Crunch and the Crisis: the unravelling of lifestyle capitalism?, by Gavin Poynter. Charts the recent historical development of a debt-led consumption model and its culmination in the current crisis.
- Costas Lapavitsas interview: the credit crunch. SOAS economics professor Lapavitsas answer some basic questions about the financial crisis.
- From Capitalist Crisis to Proletarian Slavery. George Caffentzis gives a US focused analysis of the roots of the present crisis.
- Six Frequently Asserted Fallacies of the Crisis and How to QuashThem, demystification from Mute magazine
- More Pain, No Gain for Greece – technical account of why austerity doesn’t work, by CEPR, Washington
- The State of Debt - by the Jubilee Debt Campaign UK,
Struggles & Resistance:
- Statements from Athens by the Greek debt audit campaign
a. April 2012 – Why Greece’s “debt cancellation” is responsible for shutting schools and hospitals
b. February 12th – on Greece’s second loan agreement
c. Athens Declaration: statement of action and solidarity from a conference on debt and austerity held in Athens in May 2011. For more information, and a petition, on the call for an audit commission on Greek public debt see here.
- An interview with Enric Duran, who expropriated half a million Euro from Spanish banks, distributing the money to anti-capitalist social movements. See also the ‘We Can Live Without Capitalism’ publication produced by the wider collective around Duran.
