A convincing refutation of conventional "left" wisdom about the economic crisis that focuses on it as a structural, capitalist phenomena. It rejects the notion that it was somehow uniquely "neoliberal" and that neoliberal politics have been responsible for all capitalist problems of the last 30 years, as well as rejecting the idea that simple redistribution or Keynesian policies are a good solution - with implicit rejection of all right wing ideas which refuse to tackle the plain facts of capitalist operation. It's an excellent and stats-heavy defence of Marxism without compromise.

Some of his main points (excuse me if I mess up a lot):
- Neoliberal policies didn't cause a return to increasing profitability, signs of an increasing "profit rate" were to a large extent fueled by huge increases in debt
- Recovery from the Great Depression was caused to a large extent by a "destruction of capital" where dramatic reduction in prices of property allowed take-overs of property to restore profitability (much lower capital cost but same value produced)
- No such destruction of capital happened in the 70s, preventing a return to high levels of profitability (related to the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall)
- The "profit rate" used by many economists to show recovery from neoliberal policies is a poor measure of actual profit that obscures the reality, making their analysis meaningless to reality
- Increases in inequality of wages are nowhere near as significant when total compensation (including Social Security, healthcare etc) is taken into account - total compensation for workers has not stagnated
- Bailouts were designed to save the *system* of capitalism rather than benefit individual capitalists, making talk about how they benefited the rich misleading because things like TARP often stuffed individual capitalists
- Saving capitalism by redistributing wealth downwards would actually reduce profitability further and induce further crises - the "underconsumption" theory by which the crisis is caused by workers not being able to spend as much mixes up cause and effect and is based on logical and statistical errors (most notably the idea that making goods for consumption is the ultimate goal of capital - it's quite possible for production of invested goods to increase near indefinitely and in fact the % of goods produced for further investment has increased at about 4x the rate of goods produced for consumption)
- Programs from the left focused on "saving capitalism" are therefore inherently wrong and ignore the problems experienced in the past with such policies as well as the real world situation now - they can only lead people away from meaningful revolutionary change

All is explained way way better in the book but yeah it's a great read ( )