What if we never recovered from 2008? ft. Ahmet Tonak and Sungur Savran

Ahmet Tonak and Sungur Savran argue that the crisis unleashed in 2008 never truly ended. Instead, we are living through a Third Great Depression, a long, global stagnation rooted not in market failures, but in the deep structural contradictions of capitalism. In their analysis, four schools respond to crisis:
–  Denialists: pretend it’s cyclical.
–  Keynesians: call for state stimulus, but reduce crises to psychological factors (animal spirits) avoiding any theory of production or value.
–  Schumpeterians: celebrate crisis as innovation’s motor.

 In their view, only the marxist view links crisis to falling profit rates, rising capital intensity, and the mismatch between globalised production and private ownership. They also distinguish between three main types of marxian theories of crisis (underconsumptionist, profit squeeze and falling rate of profit) arguing for the latter. Tonak and Savran reject eclecticism: not all crisis theories are equal; for them, only a marxist framework explains why capitalist crisis is recurrent, not accidental. Their concrete proposals? Seize the commanding heights: finance, energy, logistics and digital monopolies, plan production around need, not profit, and confront the ecological crisis as a product of capital’s relentless drive to accumulate.