Subjects Archives: Capitalism

Capitalism jeopardizes the survival of humanity on earth. It reduces the price of the labour of reproducing labour power when it cannot make women do it for free within the family. How can we overcome it while putting the defence of life at the centre of our concerns?

Lenin’s theory of socialism directly derives from the views of Marx and Engels, and it is manifest in his famous work, ‘The State and Revolution.’

One of the most important arguments advanced by John Maynard Keynes, the renowned economist, was that the operation of financial markets under capitalism is deeply flawed.

Smith begins with Friedrich Pollock’s definition of automation as a ‘technique of industrial production [in which] the machines are “controlled” by machines’, and shows that this trend of automation, while increasing labor productivity in the industrial and manufacturing sector, is also the reason for a lack of automation in the service sector.

Labor journalist and NewsGuild organizer Chris Brooks sat down with a group of New York City nurses and teachers to talk about how the institutions they work for are collapsing and what labor activists can do about it.

The unexpected may occur, within the quantum perspective assumed by the new cosmology: the current suffering due to the systemic crisis will not be in vain; it is accumulating benign energies that will make a leap to another, higher-order.

In the United States there are still four million persons who remain unemployed compared to before the pandemic; and yet the Biden administration’s attempt to stimulate the economy has already run into a crisis with the re-emergence of inflation not just in that country but elsewhere in the capitalist world as well.

The world lost a trailblazing thinker and feminist this week. Professor and social activist Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, passed away at the age of 69.

Since 1901, December has been a time for Nobel Prizes. Only in 1969, as an afterthought, the Swedish Central Bank established the ‘Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’—a decision that was met with protests by some members of the Nobel family.

Twenty-five years ago, “degrowth” was conceived by its proponents as a “buzzword” carrying a vague ideological charge: Serge Latouche and his supporters said they wanted to “change the way people think” in order to “get out of the economy and development”… Today, degrowth is once again being debated, but on the basis of more rigorous premises.

Eugene V. Debs may be my all-time favorite American and Karl Marx my all-time favorite journalist. But my employer for a decade was The Wall Street Journal, and for another decade it was the Los Angeles Times.

Financial capital, once cut loose from its original role as a modest helper of a real economy of production to meet human needs, inevitably becomes speculative capital geared solely to its own self-expansion. In earlier times no one ever dreamed that speculative capital, a phenomenon as old as capitalism itself, could grow to dominate a national economy, let alone the whole world. But it has.

On 31 January, at the Bourse du travail in Paris, Frédéric Lordon debated with Thomas Piketty on his book ‘Capital and Ideology’, at the invitation of Les Amis de L’Humanité. The following text is Frédéric Lordon’s opening speech, with minimal revisions.

Thirty years ago, climate modeling scientists predicted exactly the global events–massive wildfires, intensified tropical storms, flooding and droughts–that we’re seeing right now.

Although Marx himself only mentioned the “base” and “superstructure” in (by my count) two of his works, the base-superstructure “problem” remains a source of serious contention for Marxists, our sympathizers, and our critics.

The Thanksgiving holiday is built around an insidious and false creation myth–that the so-called “settling” of North America was a peaceful and amicable process.

General tendencies, possible “leaps”

To date, the Canadian government has acted as a reliable ally in the U.S.’s New Cold War against China. The need for Canada to change course is dire, but prospects are grim. Canada needs to break with this dangerous path and set course for peace and cooperation with China.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) will soon decide on a conditional temporary waiver of Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).

You don’t have to read Marx to understand the lack of power workers have under capitalism.