Chris Harman, who has just written a new book about why Marxist ideas are key to grasping how the system works, spoke to Socialist Worker

Your new book about the economic crisis is called Zombie Capitalism. What is this?

Some commentators are using the term “zombie banks” to describe a situation in which the banking system is seizing up and having adverse effects on everything around it.

The residential housing market went into a tailspin over a burst housing bubble and a whole lot of bad mortgages. The commercial real estate market has suffered a different sort of one-two punch.

Between the recession and the financial crisis, many commercial property owners were left struggling, and many banks were stuck with troubled loans on everything from shopping malls and hotels to office buildings. Exposure to commercial real estate has fueled losses at major banks such as Morgan Stanley, which reported a second-quarter loss of more than $1.2 billion on Wednesday.