My work on Marx is described as ‘significant’ and ‘meticulous’ by Barbara Harriss-White in The Socialist Register. It is, actually. And it deserves to be read.
This citation is from:
Barbara Harriss-White, Making the World a Better Place: Restitution and Restoration in Greg Albo, Leo Panitch ed, Beyond Market Dystopia: New Ways of Living: Socialist Register 2020
In Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx (2018) I took head-on the accusation that is still heard from ‘green’ critics that Marx had nothing to say on ecology and that socialism and capitalism are just the same in merely being variants of industrialism. Those criticisms are not merely wrong, they remain within the very bourgeois categories of political economy that ensure that the drivers of socio-ecological degradation and destruction remain firmly in place. I insist on precision with respect to social forms, structures, and relations. And I show that, if we are really serious about the converging crises that are upon the world, Marx is essential.
'The final stages of capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, would be marked by developments that are intimately familiar to most of us. Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it. It would prey upon, in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens. It would, as it has, increasingly relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers. Industries would mechanize their workplaces. This would trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class—the bulwark of a capitalist system—that would be disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes declined or remained stagnant. Politics would in the late stages of capitalism become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates and money of global capitalism.But as Marx warned, there is a limit to an economy built on scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, Marx knew, when there would be no new markets available and no new pools of people who could take on more debt. This is what happened with the subprime mortgage crisis. Once the banks cannot conjure up new subprime borrowers, the scheme falls apart and the system crashes.'