Left tech bros are honing Marx into a capitalist tool
Subjects Archives: Capitalism
Making capitalism history
To perish or to radically transform the way we relate to one another and to nature, that is the question humanity has never had to face until now.
Freedom and slavery: the birth of capital
We are frequently told that capitalism equals ‘freedom’; that it is the organic product of ‘human nature’. But far from arising naturally, the birth of the ‘free’ market is built on violence, dispossession, and enslavement.
How working-class movements are moving beyond the confines of capitalism
The context for organizing today that faces working people across the world is one that must grapple with the challenges posed by a decentralized production process and a well-organized ruling class.
Climate change, dust bowls, fishery collapse: metabolic rifts of capitalism and the need for socialism
Humankind and the environment are hurtling toward unprecedented ecological crises. Global warming, sea level rise, and weather extremes due to carbon emissions are catastrophic enough, but they will mix and combine with ocean acidification, air and chemical pollution, water shortages, deforestation, fishery collapse, soil erosion, and mass extinction, throwing both nature and society off a […]
Portrait of the 2009-2019 U.S. expansion
June 2019 marks the 10th anniversary of the current U.S. economic expansion. If it makes it through July it will surpass the 1991-2001 expansion as the longest on record. But while expansions are to be preferred over recessions, there are many reasons to view this record-breaking expansion critically. In fact, the nature of this expansion, […]
Carbon markets in a climate-changing capitalism
Carbon Markets in a Climate-Changing Capitalism offers an account of why these earlier expectations were not matched by experience. While the contradictions of market solutions have not gone away, the difference this time is that we are just over a decade away from the IPCC’s 2030 benchmark for 1.5°C. The concentration and centralisation of emissions […]
Notes on Marx’s “General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”
Chapter 25 of Karl Marx’s, Capital, vol. 1 (“The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”), not only explains the working conditions of the world’s peoples today; it also explains the conditions of our whole existence. Marx’s general law is nothing less than the lever upon which all our lives now pivot.
Global inequality in a time of climate emergency
Our worlds richest have a great deal of money. They also have the power to decide whether our civilization sinks or swims. So what can we do?
Anti-capitalist chronicles: Accumulation by Dispossession
Large capital takes over smaller capital and in the end you get a quasi monopolistic situation of the large capitalist dominating all else.
Finance and growth under neo-liberalism
A neo-liberal capitalist economy therefore does not have the instruments that capitalism earlier had for providing a bulwark against its slipping into recession and stagnation; the question is: does it have any instruments at all?
Traditional measures of unemployment are missing the mark
We’ve heard it countless times in recent media accounts: The economy is at “full employment.” The most recent jobs numbers, out the first week in May, show the official unemployment rate, and applications for unemployment benefits are at a 50-year low. The last time a recovery was able to push the unemployment rate to these […]
Money on the left: confronting monetary imperialism in Francophone Africa
Ndongo Samba Sylla on the history of political economy in pre- and post-colonial Africa, the theoretical bases and political stakes of the anti-CFA Franc movement, and how Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) ought to inform current and future efforts to restore political and economic sovereignty to West African nations.
Imperialism, a Marxist understanding
Imperialism benefits imperialist governments and corporations, but also the mass of the populations in the powerful countries. The marxist perspective explains how.
A Climate Emergency Manifesto to avert climate catastrophe
The panic button needs to be hit to declare climate emergency. We need serious action now; there is no more time to waste.
