Farrar, Straus and Giroux

In this sense Hilferding, Luxemburg and the rest were not ‘bad Marxists’ when they began to move away from abstractions and towards the concrete facts: they were being good materialists. Their mistake was to assert that monopolized state capitalism is the only pathway to a postcapitalist system.

The French economist Michel Husson and New School professor Ahmed Shaikh have both demonstrated how neoliberalism restored profit rates from the late 1980s onward. But these show a sharp fall in the final years before the 2008 financial crisis.28 Husson argues, correctly, that neoliberalism ‘solves’ the problem of profitability – for both individual firms (by suppressing labour costs) and for the system as a whole (by massively expanding financial profits).

Luxemburg had ignored the fact that new markets are formed in a complex way, interactively, and that they can be created not only in colonies but within national economies, local sectors, people’s homes and indeed inside their brains.