The global financial crisis and the relevance of Marx

A review of Chris Harman’s Zombie Capitalism

by Mark Walshe

The global economic crisis has sparked a
renewed interest in understanding the capitalist system. A number of books have
recently been published on the subject, notably a new edition of David Harvey’s The Limits to Capital, Joseph Choonara’s Unravelling Capitalism,
and Chris Harman’s Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of
Marx, the subject of this short review.

In recent times we've become all too
familiar with the concept of a zombie bank. We have our very own zombie
bank in Anglo Irish Bank. As John McManus put it in the Business Section of the
Irish Times, Anglo’s “reputation and balance sheet are in tatters. It
has in effect stopped lending, and will be transferring most of its loans to
the National Asset Management Agency… it is in effect a zombie.”¹

The title of Harman's book compares the
condition of banks like Anglo to the current state of capitalism. Capitalism
is a zombie system in an “undead state, incapable of fulfilling any positive
function, but representing a threat to everything else… seemingly dead when it
comes to achieving human goals and responding to human feelings, but capable of
sudden spurts of activity that cause chaos all around.”²

The book opens with the stark reminder that the chaos is
only going to get worse. “We live in an unstable world, and the instability is
going to increase… It is a world which is destroying its own environment, and
the destruction is going to increase… It is a world where people are less happy
than they used to be… and the unhappiness is going to increase.”³

This instability has even had an impact on the writing of
the book, which he began as an updated edition of a book he wrote 25 years ago, Explaining the Crisis. He had to change his original 150,000 word draft
significantly in the light of the crisis. What he expected would happen in the future had actually begun to happen in the present.

It was the credit crunch in 2007 that began to “sweep the
candyfloss away to provide a glimpse of the reality of the underlying system”⁴ and that’s really what Harman seeks to do in the book: to sweep away the
candyfloss, the obsession of mainstream economists, and to focus instead on the
underlying system, the way in which capitalism really functions, which can
ultimately provide an explanation for the crisis.

The starting point for this explanation is Marx’s Capital.
Harman devotes a couple of chapters to reviewing the concepts Marx originally
used to describe the capitalist system. But capitalism is an ageing system
which has changed since Marx first analysed it. In the next section of the
book, therefore, Harman goes “beyond Marx” to analyse the role of the state,
which has become much more significant since Marx’s time.

The rest of the book builds on these foundations. Harman
demonstrates in the most in-depth empirical detail the broad relevance of
Marx's analysis of capitalism to today’s global crisis, from the growth of
capitalism through the 20^th century, to an account of what he calls
the “new age of global instability.” The early years of the 21^st century began with the delusion that capitalism had reached a new level of
almost permanent stability. Only a few years later, however, the credit crunch
of 2007 and the subsequent crash of 2008 exposed the reality of global instability.
These events were triggered by so-called ‘innovation’ in the financial sector,
which Harman deals with in the chapter on “Financialisation and the Bubbles
that Burst.”

In the final part of the book, he looks at the “new limits
of capital” which activists are increasingly forcing onto the agenda of
mainstream politics: peak oil, global food shortages, and climate change.

Having provided a comprehensive account of
the chaotic growth and imminent threats posed by the capitalist system, having
described the problem we all face down to the last detail, he poses the
inevitable question: what are we going to do about it? If this is what’s
happening, if this is what is confronting us, what are we going to do, and,
more importantly, “Who can overcome?” The answer is that only we, the oppressed
majority of the global working class, can collectively put an end the
capitalist system.

How we set about this task depends on our
understanding of the system: where it has come from and where it is going. Zombie
Capitalism aims to provide us with this understanding so that we can make
more informed and conscious decisions about where to channel our activism.