Far from being an event of a decade ago, the 2008 global financial crisis is a manifestation of an ongoing crisis of the world order, with social, political and ecological dimensions that cannot be seen separately from each other. The root cause of the crisis can be traced back to the collapse of the Bretton Woods System in August 1971, and the failure to design an equitable and inclusive global financial and economic governance architecture consistent with the changed global economic realities. The vacuum was quickly taken up by the neoliberal orthodoxy that pushed the agenda of wholesale liberalisation, resulting in unprecedented domination of speculative finance capital and multinational corporation–led globalisation. This has seen falling share of wages in national income, growing wealth concentration, rising income inequality and ballooning of household debts. The consequence was frequent and increasingly deeper and wider financial crises.

Irresponsible lending practices on the part of financial institutions and proliferation of tradable derivatives were key causal agents of the 2008 financial crisis. However, it is less clear why, historically, loose credit arrangements were so widespread. Somewhat misleadingly, much conjecture has laid blame at the feet of financial institutions themselves. While it is true that duplicitous and even corrupt lending practices were consequential antecedents of the crisis, a legacy commitment to certain – laudable – elements of New-Dealism created context for these elements to become established. To understand really what went wrong, it is necessary to look back before the 2000s and appreciate the interaction that was occurring between a long-term policy commitment to neoliberalism and piecemeal/fragmented application of approaches that aimed to assist financially disadvantaged people. Using the analogy of heart-attack pathology to guide some of its analysis, this essay argues for better policy-integration.

The power of finance ensured that, other than for an initial fiscal push to salvage financial institutions, monetary measures in the form of quantitative easing, involving the infusion of large volumes of cheap liquidity, were the principal response to the 2008 global financial crisis. The effects of the generalised and prolonged dependence on such measures have been a substantial increase in vulnerability, at the centre of which is a huge build-up of private – especially corporate – debt, and unwarranted and unsustainable asset price inflation in both developed country and ‘emerging economy’ markets. A consequence of these processes is a massive increase in income and wealth inequality across the world, which limits the level of effective demand and growth.

The failure of exceptional monetary measures pursued in response to the financial crisis in advanced economies to achieve a strong recovery has created a widespread concern that these economies suffer from a chronic demand gap and face the prospect of stagnation. This article reviews and discusses the alternative views on the causes of the slowdown in accumulation and growth and the policies implemented and proposed to deal with it. It is argued that growing inequality, notably the secular decline in the share of wages, and financialisation are the main factors. Neither spending booms driven by financial bubbles, nor exporting unemployment through trade provides sustainable solutions. It is necessary to rebalance capital and labour, restrain finance and assign a greater role to the public sector in aggregate demand management and income and wealth distribution. However, the dominant neoliberal ideology rules out such socially progressive and economically effective solutions. Consequently, stagnation is likely to remain the new normal in the years to come with governments attempting to reignite growth by creating credit and asset bubbles and/or trying to export unemployment through beggar-thy-neighbour macroeconomic, labour market, trade and exchange rate policies, thereby generating financial and economic instability and tensions in international economic relations with significant repercussions for emerging and developing economies.

The part played by unemployment in the rise to power of Hitler weighed on the minds of leaders in Western democracies. There was a determination to create a world in which large-scale unemployment was abnormal and at worst only a temporary phenomenon. The war had shown that this was possible in a community united to pursue a common goal and the aim was to create such a community in a world free from the horrors of war, by creating communities in which the welfare of every person was important. Australia was remarkably successful in achieving this for 30 years. Its success depended on governments responding to any sustained increase in unemployment by undertaking large increases in public sector expenditure supported by accommodating monetary policy and tax cuts if desirable. In bad times as well as good, there was a determination to ensure that both the incomes and prices paid for necessities by the less well-off did not force anyone to live in poverty. The biggest obstacle to achieving this today is the growth of neoliberalism with its emphasis on ‘freedom’ or giving individuals the ability to act as they please with minimal constraints and an ideological commitment to small government.

In 1945 the Curtin Labor Government declared it had the capacity and responsibility to permanently eliminate the blight of unemployment from the lives of Australians in its White Paper ‘Full Employment in Australia’. This was the culmination of a century of struggle to establish the ‘right to work’, once a key objective of the 19th century labour movement. Deeply resented and long resisted by employer groups, the policy was abandoned in the mid-1970s, without an electoral mandate. Although the Australian Labor Party and union movement urged public vigilance to preserve full employment during 23 years of Liberal rule, after 1978 they quietly dropped the policy as the Australian Labor Party turned increasingly to corporate donors for the money they needed to stay electorally competitive. While few leading lights of today’s Labor movement care to discuss it, it is right that Australians celebrate this bold statement of our right to work, and the 30 years of full employment it heralded.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx, the last of the classical political economists. This article aims to mark the occasion by drawing attention to some of his key works in economics and to present some of his ideas in a way that will make sense to readers not familiar with or very much interested in the complexities of the labour theory of value. I begin with a brief biography and a summary of his main works in economics. I then explore in some detail ideas related to the economic surplus, unpaid labour and exploitation, and attempt to tease out the implications of his analysis for the determination of the wage share. While I argue that Marx has not succeeded in providing adequate theoretical support for his prediction that the wage share will fall as capital accumulates, he has nonetheless provided a very interesting and insightful collection of ideas by which we may, even today, approach a wide range of issues relating to production and distribution.

Since 2015, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (the so-called BAT) have constructed an empire in the Chinese Internet content industry via mergers and acquisitions. However, little is known about how professional Internet workers are experiencing this process of accumulation and consolidation. This article focuses on how social relations are reconfigured and subsumed in the capital accumulation process in the realm of the Internet content industry, using the Chinese case. It argues that fresh graduates are subsumed into the accumulation process as immaterial resources in the circulation of capital. It also offers a general critique of the capital accumulation process, as it shifts risks and costs of failure on to independent start-ups entering the industry.

In this article, we examine the effect of workforce ageing on company productivity, using an analysis based on Korean firms. We found that an increase in the ratio of workers aged over 50 years to total workers had a negative effect on value added per worker, which was consistent with the findings of most previous studies based on European data. However, the results of the analysis, including various classifications such as size, industry and several financial conditions, revealed that an increase in the ratio of older workers had positive effects on value added per worker in large manufacturing firms under risky or growing conditions. As the productivity of older workers may vary, future research may determine under what conditions – size, industry, region and financial conditions – older workers contribute positively to productivity. Firms with financial troubles or those planning to downsize should be cautious about laying off older workers as an approach to improving organisational performance because these workers contribute positively to productivity under certain conditions.