THE new year is a time to take stock. Over the past decade and a half, we have bounced from crisis to crisis. While the incompetent handling of these crises can be laid squarely at the door of the Conservative government that was in office for the bulk of this time, their roots go much deeper.

From the great economic crisis of 2007-09 to the cost-of-living crisis of 2022 onwards, we have been affected repeatedly by fractures in the economic system, which have hit working people particularly hard.

Each of these individual events has been precipitated by specific factors — most recently, the war in Ukraine, crop failures due to climate change and the destabilising impact of the Tories’ handling of Brexit. However, as Michael Roberts argues in a recent article on The Polycrisis of Capitalism (Theory and Struggle 2024), across the entire period, there are clear underlying factors, amounting to a prolonged crisis of accumulation.