“Even rock-ribbed neoclassical economists are coming around to the view that forty years of stagnant wages might have something to do with the attack on unions; that the decline of the labor movement in turn accelerated the shift to the right in politics; that this shift in turn led to a pretty successful evisceration of what little social support the gave to the poor; that when the mad rush for short-term profits finally drove the economy into the tank, the state returned the favor by passing off the costs to the public and handed over trillions of dollars to the banks….. Of course, Marx has something to offer not only in times of crisis. Marx’s whole point was that crises only bring into clearer relief the instability and power dynamics built into capitalism. Periods of economic crises do not generate but are caused by the economic and political contradictions of capitalism. The obscene concentration of wealth in the two decades preceding the 2008 crisis shows that there is no mechanism to push for a sustainable, let alone fair, allocation of resources within capitalism.”
Nivedita Majumdar,  Why We’re Marxists | Jacobin, Summer 2014