THE REAL CRISES OF CAPITALISM

Most people will recall the numerous articles on "The Crisis of Capitalism" during the height of the global credit crunch and dire warnings of economic depression to follow. Whilst the more extreme of these prophesies do not seem to have materialised, the threat of another "financial apocalypse" was nevertheless featured on MSN News only the other day, reminding us that economic angst still abounds.

For there remains a very real "crises" - as distinct from single over-arching "crisis" - of capitalism which continues to manifest itself, albeit in different ways in different places around the world.

In a country like Britain, one symptom of the crises is a deepening concern about disparities of income, not just between extreme high earners, such as some bankers, and other people, but increasingly between highly paid individuals in the public sector, their less well rewarded colleagues, and the wider public.

Given the constant attention given to this widening UK wealth gap, it was very interesting to hear the response of a woman whose family lived on benefits as to whether she regarded herself as poor. No, she responded, she regarded poor people at those primarily living in the less developed world ie in conditions of extreme poverty.

Yet it is precisely these countries, such as India, where many millions - indeed billions - of poor people live who are now regarded as the engines of global economic growth and recovery; and one of the main reasons for this is, quite simply, the existence of very large numbers of people whose wages are far lower both in relative and absolute terms than those of people in countries such as Britain.

As the global balance of economic power inevitably shifts away from countries like our own, albeit that London may remain one of the world's financial capitals, questions will increasingly arise as to the real value of the UK economy and the relative importance of professions and sectors which contribute to this, as well as the affordability of public services and social security.

In this context, it will be increasingly important to distinguish between the financially engineered, virtually constructed and speculative economies, with their vulnerability to boom and bust cycles, and the more robust underlying economies of production etc. At present, it is often difficult to know where true financial value lies, and this in itself constitutes one of the crises of capitalism.