What this document is
Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin wrote this essay as the lead piece for Socialist Register 2011, an annual anthology of Marxist political and economic analysis published that year under the title The Crisis This Time. The essay reads the 2007-08 financial crisis against a longer history of capitalist crises, drawing a comparison as far back as the 1857 collapse of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company to argue that periodic breakdowns are a structural feature of capitalism rather than a departure from it.
Panitch, a political scientist long associated with the Socialist Register series, and Gindin, an economist and former research director for the Canadian Auto Workers union, use the essay to question whether the crisis marked a genuine turning point for the political left or mainly exposed the limits of existing regulatory responses. The piece has been cited more than a hundred times in later academic work on the politics of the 2008 crisis.
The essay appears within Socialist Register, an annual publication now run through an open-access journal platform rather than a single print run, where earlier volumes including the 2011 edition can be traced through the journal's own archive.
Where to find it
Available from Socialist Register.