Interview with John Bellamy Foster on his new book, “Breaking the bonds of fate, Epicurus and Marx Epicurus”.

Since the end of WW2, the imperialist bloc (IC) annually got around 1% of their GDP through the transfer of surplus value in international trade from the rest of the major ‘developing’ economies (DC) in the G20; while the latter lost about 1% of their GDP in surplus value transferred to the imperialist bloc. And these ratios were rising.

The recent massive demonstrations against the Macron administration in France forcing through so-called pension reforms reveals the determined attempts of pro-capitalist governments in all the major economies to cut real wages when we are old and can no longer work.

The G7 governments have a problem.

Last week, Ukraine’s foreign private creditors agreed to the country’s request for a two-year freeze on payments on about $20bn of foreign debt.

The major economies are moving closer to recession, if they are not already there; and yet inflation rates continue to rise (for now). 

A few weeks ago, the world’s richest man Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, told his employees that they must return to the office or get out of the company.  Musk wrote in an email that everybody at Tesla must spend at least 40 hours a week in the office.

If anything proves that famine and food insecurity are man-made rather than due to vagaries of nature and the weather, it is the current food crisis that is putting millions globally close to starvation.

Marx’s first sentence in Capital Volume One is: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an “immense accumulation of commodities”, its unit being a single commodity.” (Moore and Aveling translation).

What is the experience and future for China and its Communist party rule?  It seems appropriate to consider a number of new books on China that have been published that try to answer this question.

The sixth report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) runs to nearly 4,000 pages. The IPCC has tried to summarise its report as the ‘final opportunity’ to avoid climate catastrophe.

In the light of the current pandemic, here is a rough excerpt from my upcoming short book on Engels’ contribution to Marxian political economy on the 200th anniversary of his birth.

My gap year ends in August, but it doesn’t take a college degree in economics to realise that our remaining 1,5° carbon budget and ongoing fossil fuel subsidies and investments don’t add up.