A handy overview of some of 2025’s most stimulating books about political economy.
Michael Roberts is an Economist in the City of London and a prolific blogger.
Cross-posted from Michael Roberts’ blog
Every year at this time, I look back at the books that I have reviewed during the year on this blog. This time I shall include some that I did not review but now consider might interest readers.
Let’s start with some mainstream works that attracted much attention. In the US, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, writers at liberal mainstream The New York Times and The Atlantic, respectively, was greeted with enthusiasm by many mainstream economists politically on the Democrat wing. But the book’s arguments are less a critique of Trumpism and all his works, than an attack on what authors consider are leftist economics. The authors reckon that ‘the left’ had lost their ability in (Biden) government to carry out great projects that could deliver the things and services that working people (called the ‘middle class’ in America) need. That’s why the Democrats lost to Trump in 2024.
The US needed to get back to making stuff to meet people’s needs: achieiving ‘abundance’, not redistributing existing wealth; the economy must grow, not stagnate. Too many well-off ‘liberals’ were only interested in things like regulations on pollution, or on stopping housing projects, or new roads etc. These liberal policies are standing in the way of just allowing capitalism (or to be more exact, capitalist combines) to get on with delivering.
There is much truth in the authors’ argument that America is no longer delivering on basic needs; and it is falling behind in implementing important technologies. But is it true that why America is failing to deliver a decent, reasonably priced health service is because of too much regulation and nimbyism ‘(not in my backyard’)? Is it true that America has failed to deliver a high quality education service for young people without huge student debt because of too much regulation and cultural elitism? Is it true that America’s roads and bridges are falling apart because of planning regulations and legal actions?
The authors make much of the housing crisis in America – a crisis that they blame on regulations, local opposition to planning etc. But whatever truth there is in that, it pales into insignificance with the real cause of the housing crisis. There are just not enough homes being built, even though US population growth and household formation is slowing. Yes, we need more stuff and an ‘abundance’ of what working people need. But this book directs its sights towards planning regulations as the obstacle to abundance not to the real blockages imposed by the vested interests of the fossil fuel giants, the private equity moguls, the building and construction companies, and private sector control of America’s health and education.
Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang has been praised to the skies for its analysis of the differences between the US and China and why China is gaining ground. Wang, a research fellow at the right-wing Hoover History Lab at Stanford, argues that the contrast between the two superpowers is not because of different economic systems, but due to an American elite that is made up of “mostly lawyers, excelling at obstruction, versus a Chinese technocratic class, made up of mostly engineers, that excels at construction”. To me, this seems a stretch, to say the least. Surely China’s rise to threaten US economic hegemony is more due to high rates of productive investment, and an industrial strategy directed by the state and led by state enterprises, compared to a US economy that mostly engages in investing in speculative financial assets and ‘business services’.
China In Global Capitalism by Eli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rosa Liu, and Ashley Smith starts from the premiss that China is a capitalist economy, fundamentally in the same mode as the US. Indeed, China is imperialist in the same way as the US – both are in rivalry to dominate the world. This is a majority view among the left in the West, although not among mainstream economists. They are divided between those who consider China as ‘communist’ because it has no liberal democracy and those who reckon China’s economic success is due to its adoption of capitalism after Deng in the late 1970s. The authors take basically the same position as the latter mainstream economists. China is not socialist because it has no workers democracy, billioniares and a large capitalist sector. So it must be capitalist and even imperialist. Readers of this blog know that I take a minority view: namely that China is not capitalist because capitalist markets and companies do not dominate investment; and capitalists do not control the government.
Having sold a million copies in China in 2024, How China Works by Xiaohuan Lan provides an alternative view, namely that China’s economic success is based not on a revival of capitalist progress, but instead on state investment driven by the five-year planning cycles. The “commanding heights” of the economy: banking, electricity production, railways, heavy industry, shipbuilding, shipping and universities are in state hands and the state prioritizes the support of the broader economy and the national interest above profits. But Lan goes to the other pole, arguing that China is in the ‘primary stage’ of socialism and on the road to full socialism. I leave the reader to decide who has a better grasp of the nature of the Chinese economy: Friedman, Lin and Smith or Xiaohuan Lan.
Let us move onto some other Marxist works. Canadian Marxist sociologists Murray EG Smith and Tim Hayslip have written a profound and wide-ranging book that aims to elaborate and popularize the principles of ‘dialectical reasoning’. The book’s full title is Thinking Systematics: Critical-Dialectical Reasoning for a Perilous Age and a Case for Socialism.
Karl Marx declared “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Smith and Hayslip add to this observation: “Philosophers have only interpreted human thinking in various ways.The need, however, is to improve it – greatly.” The authors argue that dialectical reasoning is essential if humans are to improve their understanding of the natural world, human society and the relationship between the two. Their particular paradigm of critical-dialectical reasoning, the authors call Thinking Systematics (TSS). TSS refers to methods and ways of thinking that encourage a more systematic (scientific) view of the world, one that substantially improves our ability to discover “objective truths about the current human condition and to revolutionise our individual and collective understandings of a larger world that most of us engage with far too passively.”
The authors recognise that formal logic (e.g. A = A, but not B) is foundational and useful in many circumstances. But it is inadequate when dealing with change, both in nature and in society. How can these insights be applied to current problems and controversies? One example, in my view, is that dialectical reasoning can help us to understand the nature of the Chinese economy and state. As above, many say that it is capitalist; others say it is socialist. In my view, it is neither. How can that be? In formal logic A = A, but not B. So China must be either capitalist or socialist. But when thinking dialectically (or ‘systematically’), China can be seen as an economy in transition: it is ‘in between’. “Socialist China” is no more a correct description than “capitalist China.” If we rely on a strict formal logic, this is confusing. But dialectical reasoning cuts through the confusion by allowing us to see China through the lens of uneven and combined development using the concept of transitional forms.
Güney Işıkara and Patrick Mokre have published an insightful book that explains how Marx’s theory of value operates to explain the trends and fluctuations in modern capitalist economies. Called Marx’s Theory of Value at the Frontiers – Classical Political Economics, Imperialism and Ecological Breakdown, the title tells the reader that the book is about taking Marx’s law of value towards what they call its ‘frontiers’, namely markets and trade; imperialism and the global environmental crisis.
In their book, Isikara and Mokre show how Marx’s value theory is essential to understanding the key issues facing the world in the 21st century. The authors offer new and revealing empirical data measuring the level of value transfer through trade and corporate value chains from the Global South to the imperialist North. They argue powerfully that deviations between market prices, production prices, and labour values are central to understanding international value transfers due to differential capital compositions and rates of exploitation, as well as explaining the central role of rent and accumulation in the capitalist-induced ecological crisis. As such, the book is “a handbook for Marxist practitioners”.
Robert Dees has written an opus of over 1700pp in two huge volumes, called The Power of Peasants – the economics and politics of farming in medieval Germany.
Dees argues that, contrary to mainstream economic history, peasants or farmers in overwhelmingly agricultural ancient and medieval economies played an essential role in advancing civilisation in Europe. Civilisation in this context means raising the productivity of labour through improvements in farming technique and technical innovations—the farmers’ “creative genius”—and thus the living standards and the health of the multitude. The peasants were not some amorphous dull mass that were just victims of class rule by Roman slaveholders or feudal lords. They had agency; they fought on many occasions (not often successfully) to break the grip of the ruling class. When they succeeded and gained a degree of independence in production and control of the surplus produced, they took society forward. Dees provides a new explanation for the causes of the Peasant War of 1525 in Germany and the long-term effects of its defeat—both contrary to existing scholarship. This will be of particular interest in this 500th anniversary year of that event.
The most powerful book of the year is William I Robinson’s Epochal Crisis. Robinson is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a prolific award-winning author.
In Epochal Crisis, Robinson has delivered a searing analysis of the demise of global capitalism in the 21st century. He defines that crisis as composed of three factors: the end of globalization in trade and finance; increased financialisation of the major economies; and “an unprecedented and multidimensional crisis that points to the impending exhaustion of global capitalism’s capacity for renewal”. In effect, Robinson argues that the various contradictions in 21st century have merged into what many call a polycrisis: “the current crisis is like no other. An epochal crisis signals the irreversible decline in capitalism’s capacity to reproduce itself.”
There is much in these arguments, but I have some caveats. Robinson rejects Marx’s theory of crises based on the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, preferring the melange provided by Ernest Mandel who tried to ‘merge’ Marx’s law of profitability with an underconsumption theory of slumps. Mandel opposed what he called a ‘monocausal’ explanation. Robinson also rejects Henryk Grossman’s theory of crises, which I think follows Marx, to move more in favour of Rosa Luxemburg’s underconsumption theory. I have dealt with these confusions on several occasions, here and here. Also, Robinson follows the majority of Marxists who argue, as above, that China is capitalist and imperialist.
Most interestingly, having told the reader that capitalism is in an existentialist, epochal crisis that cannot be reversed, Robinson says this will still take decades to work out. In the meantime, “the most likely scenario is a new round of capitalist expansion through digitalization that momentarily restores growth and profit rates yet aggravates the underlying contradictions that drive the crisis. Radical redistributive and regulatory reform advocated by sectors of the transnational elite may attenuate social polarization, expand markets, and mediate intra-capitalist competition and interstate conflict, but only for a time being.” I agree that this is very likely, but it does shove back the culmination of epochal crisis well into this century.
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