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The State of Capitalism: a Letter from the Editor

One of our August Verso Book Club selections.

13 July 2023

The State of Capitalism: a Letter from the Editor

Costas Lapavitsas is a Marxist political economist of a rare and unusual type in at least three different aspects. Firstly, as a Greek who has lived most of his adult life in the UK, he is a genuine internationalist, not just in the vague, feel-good sense but in practice. His reading and theoretical engagements range far wider than the usual bubble of anglophone Marxist economists, who often end up citing and refuting each other only: Costas’s references encompass also French, German, Greek and other authors and, most interestingly, he developed a particular fascination in an earlier period of his life for Japanese Marxism, spurring him to learn the language, spend time there and discuss with this surprisingly strong (if almost entirely academic) tradition. 

Secondly, unlike so many Marxist economists who operate as “lone wolves” roving the outer steppes of value theory with only perhaps a research assistant or PhD student for company, Costas is master at coordinating collaborative projects (although he is also the author of some crucial monographs under just his signature, such as Profiting without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All). In the throes of the Greek crisis of 2015, Verso was able to rapidly and successfully publish his booklet co-written with Heiner Flassbeck, Against the Troika: Crisis and Austerity in the Eurozone. But Costas had already laid the groundwork for this volume with his text Crisis in the Eurozone, which was composed with eleven other authors from his Research in Money and Finance group. Also rushed out in a timely fashion was the pamphlet The Cost of Living Crisis (and how to get out of it) with James Meadway and Doug Nicholls. In the new book, The State of Capitalism: Economy, Society and Hegemony, Costas has brought together ten co-authors from European Research Network on Social and Economic Policy – authors based in Germany, Spain, Greece, the USA, Turkey and the UK – for a volume that, just like the aforementioned volume on the Eurozone, is not a compilation of articles or papers but a genuinely collaboratively written work.

Finally, Costas is no Kathedersozialist or ivory tower radical with only the university campus as his horizon. On the contrary, for Costas, radical scholarship is a tool in the practical, political struggle here and now to transform working people’s lives, even when this means dirtying his hands, such as when he served as an MP in the Greek parliament after 2015, first as a member of Syriza and then as a left dissident and member of the Popular Unity party. More recently, Costas was actively involved in coordinating an electoral alliance between Popular Unity and Yanis Varoufakis’s MeRA25 organisation.

All these elements come together in this new book, which is simultaneously an arresting global conspectus of the tendencies and countertendencies of international capitalism today (in a phase, since the 2008 crisis, that Costas describes as an “interregnum”), in the wake of the pandemic, Ukraine war and inflation crisis; a theoretical investigation of the key concepts required in an updated form to understand the contemporary situation (hegemony, imperialism, core and periphery, financialisation and so on); and a call to arms to the global left to reformulate a radical programme of economic policies, rooted in a defence of combined national and popular sovereignty, that both respond to immediate demands and which could open up the paths towards a postcapitalist future.

 

Sebastian Budgen, Editorial Director, Verso Books

Paris, July 2023

 

The State of Capitalism by Costas Lapavitsas is one of our August Verso Book Club reading selections! See more about the Verso Book Club here.

 

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The State of Capitalism
The health emergency that broke out in 2020 is a landmark event in the development of capitalism, confirming the underlying change signalled by the Great Crisis of 2007-9. The Pandemic Crisis has c...
The Cost of Living Crisis
We are living through a cost of living crisis, with interest rate hikes and the prices of everyday consumables and energy bills sky-rocketing. Why is this happening? Sometimes we are told that wage...
Crisis in the Eurozone
First, there was the credit crunch, and governments around the world stepped in to bail out the banks. The sequel to that debacle is the sovereign debt crisis, which has hit the eurozone hard. The ...
Paperback
Profiting Without Producing
Financialization is one of the most innovative concepts to emerge in the field of political economy in the last three decades, although there is no agreement on what exactly it is. Profiting With...
Paperback
Against the Troika

Against the Troika

On the 25th January 2015 the Greek people voted in an election of historic importance—not just for Greece but potentially all of Europe. The radical party Syriza was elected and austerity and the...
Paperback

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