THE ORIGINS OF THE CRASH AND THE LIMITS ON RECOVERY Tom Bramble Three years after the global financial crisis (GFC) it is timely to assess its origins, impacts and consequences. The dominant explanation for the crisis in popular discourse has focused on factors that lie outside the sphere of capital accumulation, whether these are the ‘common sense’ ideas that the GFC resulted from unbridled ‘greed’ by the bankers or the incapacity of poor people to manage their mortgages, or the Keynesian notion that the crisis resulted from inadequate regulation of the financial system (Elliott & Atkinson, 2008; Roubini, 2009). To the extent that there is a solution to these problems, other than moral homilies addressed to financiers, most writers have pointed to the need for better regulation of the financial system and a more balanced relationship between financial and productive capital (Arestis & Sawyer, 2010). Such themes are evident also in the work of some of those working in the Marxist tradition, such as Blackburn (2008). Common to all of them is the idea that capitalism can somehow be reformed into performing more effectively and future crises warded off (McNally, 2011: 88). In this article I draw on a very different account of the crisis provided by Chris Harman (2009) which builds upon and updates his earlier work (Harman, 1984). In these books Harman provides a cogent account of the development of post-war capitalism and capitalism’s crisis tendencies and uses these to explain the roots of the GFC. Harman (2009) argues that the crisis has its roots not in financialisation or greedy bankers, but the long term slowing down in the dynamism of the advanced economies. While this gradual slowing of the advanced economies is something that has been recognised and widely discussed by a range of writers (Itoh, 1990; Armstrong, Glyn & Harrison, 1991; Brenner, 2006), Harman provides a compelling account of Marx's analysis of capital accumulation and spells out a persuasive explanation of the boom and