Held in conjunction with ST 600 "Market Failure, Famines and Crises," Dr. Alex Callinicos is the fourth speaker in the Committee on Social Theory Spring Lecture Series. The 2007-8 financial crash and the deep recession and weak recovery that followed have exposed serious flaws in our economic system. But how deep do they lie? Are the faults simply a matter of poor financial regulation or banks that are too big to fail? Karl Marx argued that ' The true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself.’ In other words, capitalism is subject to inherent limits arising from its nature as a system based on class exploitation and driven by competitive accumulation. This lecture will seek to show how a Marxist understanding of capitalism can identify the interaction between deep-seated structural tendencies towards crisis and the cycle of boom and bust in the financial markets responsible for what some commentators are beginning to call the Long Depression. At a time when a new study by French economist Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century, has identified an inherent trend towards growing economic inequality, Marx’s original Capital repays renewed study. Dr. Callinicos is a professor of European Studies at King's College London. His latest book is The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (Haymarket), 2012.