Marxian economists recognize, just like mainstream economists, that capitalism has radically transformed the world in recent decades, continuing and in some cases accelerating long-term trends.
Subjects Archives: Capitalism
The revolutionary answers of C.L.R. James
The Black Lives Matter movement across the U.S. against police violence and racist inequality is one of the most dynamic political developments in years.
Times remain hard, especially for low-wage workers
The current economic crisis has hit workers hard. Unemployment rates remain high, with total weekly initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits continuing to grow.
The protracted crisis of capitalism
THERE is a commonly-held view that the current crisis in capitalism, which has resulted in a massive output contraction and increase in unemployment, is because of the pandemic; and that once the pandemic gets over, things will go back to “normal”.
‘What stage of capitalism is this?’ Hedge fund $3 billion richer thanks to wager on wildfire insurance claims
With over 100,000 people displaced by wildfires raging across California, Baupost Group collected more than $3 billion in July after betting on insurance claims against embattled utility company PG&E.
Under capitalism Black Lives are adrift and vulnerable
Post-Civil War arrangements by which the victorious North settled with the defeated slavocracy ensured that many Black people would not matter much and that some would die. A thousand or so were murdered in the South in 1866, reports W.E. B Du Bois.
“Information has value”: The political economy of information capitalism
The “Information Has Value” frame provides a welcome opening to discuss information capitalism, including the commodification of information, information labor, concentration of ownership, and audience data extraction/surveillance.
“A disturbing milestone”: America’s top 12 plutocrats now own $1 Trillion in wealth
New figures from the Institute for Policy Studies show that, despite a pandemic that has stunted the economy for months, America’s billionaire class is becoming richer than ever, adding nearly $700 billion to their fortune since the nationwide lockdown in March.
You can’t understand capitalism without race
The centrality of race in the devilment of capitalism continues to be resisted by “the sort of hardline, orthodox folks who only look at class, alongside the sort of liberals and so-called racial multiculturals who have the misconception that race no longer matters,” said Charisse Burden-Stelly, professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College.
Dear Future Generations: Sorry
An Apology Letter to Future Generations. Sorry.
Reflections on Marxism and Law: A Review of Igor Shoikhedbrod’s Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism
The book complicates the common narrative that Marx was the quintessential critic of liberal rights. Shoikhedbrod’s close and careful reading of Marx’s texts is insightful and targeted. The book helps readers to think about the role of law and rights under capitalism, and also to imagine its future in a communist society.
Where is resistance to structural violence of capitalism?
The reality in the United States has come to this: 160,000 dead in four months, thousands hospitalized, and many thousands sick or afraid to be sick because they have no sick days and no health insurance.
Dead Zones: Industrial agriculture versus ocean life
Worldwide, there are now over a thousand coastal areas where fish can’t breathe. The nitrogen that makes crops grow is also destroying offshore ecosystems.
Samir Amin
Samir Amin is, incontestably, the greatest intellectual—luckily, a Marxist!
The organic intellectual: Remembering Samir Amin two years on
‘In our era, when we consider the destructive (ecological and military) might at the disposal of the powers-that-be, the risk, denounced by Marx in his time, that war will end up destroying all the opposing camps, is real. The alternate path demands the lucid and organized intervention of the internationalist front of workers and peoples.’
COVID-19, capitalism and climate
No one should have been surprised by COVID-19. Epidemiologists have been warning for decades about the increasing danger of novel virus pandemics that could cause major human suffering, disrupt the economy and exacerbate the growing inequalities that characterizes the modern world.
Has anything changed since 1840? Trade, imperialism, Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta megacity
In modern times, China has been the ultimate challenge for imperialists: it’s independence being an enigma to Europeans and Americans. From Marco Polo to Mike Pompeo, China has been a mystery to Christian crusaders.
On robots and sheep
A short introduction to historical materialism and its significance for the understanding of contemporary capitalism.
Colleges layoff underpaid adjuncts then challenge their unemployment claims
Unemployment insurance laws were developed prior to the widespread use of contingent faculty, and were designed to prevent K-12 teachers and full-time college professors from collecting unemployment during scheduled term breaks and summer vacations when they weren’t teaching. In nearly all states, these laws are being used to prevent adjuncts, who have since become the […]
Fascism: The decay of capitalism
Talk about the decaying global capitalist system, the fascist aesthetic, the construction of “the other” and where we might be headed if we don’t do something quick.
