[Vid 16 min,23 secs] Paul Mattick Jr. "The 2008 economic crisis was the beginning of a very long and deep Depression - Capitalism, Business as Usual"

Published on 3 Apr 2016

At the end of February the book appeared - "Business as usual. Crisis and failure of capitalism "by Paul Mattick Jr. 

He is the son of Paul Mattick, a counselor of economics and economics, whose book" Marx and Keynes The Limits of the Mixed Economy "is particularly relevant to the current situation. John Maynard Keynes, as Mattick jr makes clear in his book, assumed with the neoclassical economic theorists  that economic crises are triggered by external factors. Mattick argues that crises are a fundamental component of capitalism - "business as usual". 

Paul Mattick draws our attention to the fact that this is due to completely wrong assumptions by the economists: most economic theorists are blind to the fact that capitalism is a system in which the so - called "profit - making" is not an exception but the motive force and drive.  Thus "the total value of the goods produced must be greater [...] than the sum of all wages in order to make profit" (p.39). Crises are, therefore, nothing more than a "necessary interruption of these money flows" (p.43). The only new feature of the current crisis is its first-ever global character, as the "tendency to the world market" (Marx). 

Mattick makes it clear once again that the current crisis is merely the continuation of the crisis of the 1970s, which could be suppressed by various speculative bubbles to the present day, until even the largest of these bubbles - the US real estate bubble - burst the whole edifice. 

Both in the book and in the interview, it becomes clear that a return to Keynesianism is no longer possible. Paul Mattick explains in an interview that what his father has predicted has also happened: "That Keynesianism will be unable to prevent a new start of the economic cycle - and even that the next depression will be the new form of a combination of inflation and inflation Stagnation ". The "Keynesian map," says Mattick in his book, "has already been largely played out" (p.129). 

Mattick, however, also diagnoses a crisis of the left. "The greatest unknown, when one thinks about the future of capitalism, is the willingness to accept the world's population [...]" (p.134). Paul Mattick's perspective on the future therefore does not lie in some sort of rescue of this economy, but in "organizing mutual aid in the face of a catastrophe".