Thinking Systematics (TSS) is conceived as a toolkit for the mind -- designed to improve how we think about the world, analyze information and pursue our goals. Smith and Hayslip make a compelling argument that individual thinking and collective decision making are being systematically constrained within limits imposed by outmoded forms of cognition and the determination of privileged elites to perpetuate an unsustainable status quo. The dialectical reasoning advocated in this wide-ranging book aims to overcome those limits and to allow a much more profound understanding of the human condition in the 21st century.

Mainstream problem-solving focuses almost exclusively on scientific/technological fixes on one side and moral/cultural remedies on the other. But to comprehend our world adequately far more serious attention must be given to the specifically social, economic and political arrangements shaping our lives. Once embraced by growing numbers of people, TSS strategies, methods and habits of thought can contribute significantly to a new common sense -- one adequate to meeting the immense challenges facing humanity in our era.

This updated and expanded edition critically explores and makes significant contributions to the debate surrounding Karl Marx's capitalist law of value.'

In the 21st century, the capitalist system has little more to offer than a menu of despair: pandemics, deepening inequality, worsening depression, out-of-control climate change, growing authoritarianism and intensifying militarism. This book offers a wide-ranging analysis of the origins, implications and scope of the combined crises of 2020 and beyond. It makes a compelling case that Karl Marx's critical analysis of capitalism, as well as his program of class-struggle socialism, are essential to understanding and addressing the most important social, economic, and ecological problems of our time.

As we experience yet another deep economic recession, people throughout the world are feeling the symptoms of capitalist crisis, from unemployment to bankruptcy to deficits to cutbacks and so on. With this timely book, Murray E.G. Smith invites readers to a reconsideration of the themes pertinent to an understanding of capitalist economic crises and to discussion of the ways to overcome them.

The text is broad-ranging, integrating eleven studies that consider the theory of labour-value from historical, philosophical, and economic perspectives. Smith incorporates a thorough review of the controversy that has raged around Marx's theory of labour-value, reporting the key arguments of orthodox Marxists, neo-Ricardians, neo-orthodox Marxists, and fundamentalists Marxists. He concludes that the Marxian theory of labour-value remains a logically coherent and theoretically sound basis for understanding capitalism's historical-structural crises. Also included is a reconsideration of Marx's law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit along with a statistical analysis of long-term trends in the Canadian economy had lend support to Marx's views.

This original and important contribution to Marxist debates will appeal to an international community of political economists and Marx scholars. Its comprehensive reporting and analysis will also attract a broader audience of historians and philosopher.

Providing a Marxian analysis of the origins, implications, and scope of the current economic downturn, this critique of global capitalism argues that the ongoing crisis is not merely a result of overProduction and problems with credit and finance, but rather a deep-seated systemic failure of capitalism itself. The discussion clearly roots the present economic slump in the history of capitalism and contends that, in order to find a more permanent solution, the crisis needs to be understood structurally, as the result of a failed theory, rather than as an aberration.