Subjects Archives: Capitalism

The beginning of July saw the hottest days on record globally.

Under monopoly capitalism of course this relationship between monopoly capitalists and the state becomes far closer. Rudolf Hilferding in his opus Das Finanzkapital had talked of a “personal union” between banks and industrial capital and the formation on this basis of a “financial oligarchy”, and had suggested a similar “personal union” between the “financial oligarchy” and the State.

Each member of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index made an average of over $14 million per day over the last six months—even as 47 percent of the world’s population barely survived on $6.25 a day.

Jayati Ghosh speaks about the growing debt crisis in the global south, the IMF’s never-ending affinity for austerity and the need to confront the power of financial capital.

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx highlighted that “constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones”.

Rising corporate profits have caused 45% of inflation in Europe, compared to 40% for rising import prices and just 15% for workers’ wages, according to research by IMF economists.

The saga of the OceanGate Titan submersible was the sort of story that rivets millions of people. Not only was it revealed that passengers paid $250,000 to see the wreck of the Titanic, but the vessel was poorly built, and its creator ignored warnings about its defects and continued to use it.

A Deeply Misleading Narrative: Answering the Claims of Cedric Robinson’s ‘Black Marxism’.

Spend less, work longer or get another job, move in with your parents or get a flatmate. But whatever you do, don’t push for a pay rise to compensate for inflation.

The question we should be asking isn’t whether AI can replace humans. It should be: why are some humans so intent on replacing the jobs that the rest of us hold, with AI?

Farmers from across the Americas are working together to envision a new food system based on food sovereignty and political justice.

Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou recently declared a state of emergency in the capital, Montevideo, due to water shortages.

State Farm recently announced that it is halting new insurance policies for homeowners in the state of California, where the agency is currently the top insurance provider, due to rising “catastrophe exposure” coupled with inflating construction costs.

Even if Japanese Marxist Kohei Saito had not written Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, the left today would still need to take the idea of degrowth seriously. This is because, economist and anthropologist Jason Hickel explains, “while it’s possible to transition to 100 percent renewable energy, we cannot do it fast enough to stay under 1.5°C or 2°C if we continue to grow the global economy at existing rates.”

Last month, the U.S. National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, outlined the international economic policy of the U.S. administration. This was a pivotal speech, because Sullivan explained what is called the New Washington Consensus on U.S. foreign policy.

In 2021, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) noted that Argentina remains ‘a major exporter of agricultural products’, which, at that time, accounted for nearly two-thirds of the country’s exports (as of April 2023, agricultural goods accounted for 56.4% of the country’s exports).

The deadliest train crash in India in more than a quarter of a century has killed nearly 300 passengers and injured more than 1,000. It is a tragedy that has horrified the world and exposed the criminal neglect of basic infrastructure by the ultra-right regime of Hindu chauvinist Narendra Modi and the capitalist governments that preceded it.

Or is Eternal Energy = Eternal Damnation?

The difficulty the U.S. faces in its current attempts to damage China’s economy was analysed in detail in the article “The U.S. is trying to persuade China to commit suicide”. Reduced to essentials, the U.S. problem is that it possesses no external economic levers powerful enough to derail China’s economy.

Stuart Jordan responds to criticism of his article on ecology and entropy in Solidarity 672