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.
Subjects Archives: Capitalism
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.
Seven theses on the Capitalist Democratic State
What is the capitalist democratic state and how should it be confronted? This question has bedevilled the left for generations. On the one hand, a social democratic conception of the state as a neutral institution that needs to be occupied and captured by bureaucrats with the right ideas has lead to experiments in socialist governance […]
PepsiCo and Monsanto’s bogus court cases are war on Indian farmers
At the heart of the struggle is capital’s need–Monsanto and Pepsico’s–to continuously enclose spheres and generate surpluses from creating a monopoly over something that it does not actually own.
The racist dawn of capitalism
The centrality of slavery to capitalism is not new, as any serious student of WEB Dubois is aware.
Imagining the Green New Deal with Robert Hockett
In this episode, we speak with Robert Hockett, Edward Cornell Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. At Cornell, about his role in crafting the Green New Deal Resolution, his conception of finance as a franchise, and his experience as an advisor to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as well to Senators Sanders and Warren.
Cyclone Idai, sanctions and capitalism
Western capitalists are to blame largely for climatic changes that causes natural and environmental disasters. Poverty, which is a result of the diabolic and pernicious economic sanctions, has forced the poor to build poor and weak structures that do not withstand the heavy winds and storms.
A new unionism for the twenty-first century
As we contemplate the ongoing decline of British trade unions, and as Americans consider their next move after the Supreme Court’s Janus vs AFSME decision, the the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) and United Voices of the World (UVW) point towards an alternative way of organising, fighting—and winning.
