It has been revealed that the US National Security Agency has been given backdoor access to telephone exchanges and a long range of online accounts from major service providers, underlining how the state breaches users’ privacy on a massive scale in order to get intelligence. Niklas Albin Svensson looks at the latest manoeuvres of the capitalist state and the implications for the labour movement.

The cat-and-mouse game between piracy supporters on the one hand and state authorities and major multinational companies on the other is heating up. Over the past few years there has been a marked increase in the persecution of websites and individuals involved in piracy. Democratic rights are being thrown overboard and the full force of the state applied in the media industry’s ruthless pursuit of profits.

The following article was originally published in the summer issue of our theoretical magazine In Defence of Marxism. In a previous article from the IDOM magazine, we polemicised against the theory of “under-consumption” as an explanation of capitalist crisis. In this article, we wish to look at Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and explore the wider question of how to approach economics in a dialectical manner.