Subjects Archives: Capitalism

A review of Daniel Goldhaber’s film adaptation of Swedish author Andreas Malm’s polarizing book ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’.

Renfrey Clarke is an Australian journalist. Throughout the 1990s he reported from Moscow for Green Left Weekly of Sydney. This past year, he published The Catastrophe of Ukrainian Capitalism: How Privatisation Dispossessed & Impoverished the Ukrainian People with Resistance Books.

THE data on unemployment brough out by the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) present a grim picture. Not only has the unemployment rate increased sharply for some years now, starting from even before the pandemic, but the figure which had shot up during the pandemic has not come down much despite the recovery that has occurred in the level of GDP from its trough.

Economist Michael Hudson discusses the collapse of four U.S. banks in two months, giant JP Morgan Chase taking over First Republic Bank, and how government regulators are in bed with the bankers.

The United States spent $877 billion on its military in 2022, nearly 40% of the global total, 10 times more than Russia ($86.4 billion), and three times more than China ($292 billion). The U.S. military budget is larger than the next 10 biggest spenders combined.

JANET Yellen, the U.S. treasury secretary, has finally acknowledged what has been obvious to most people for quite some time, namely that the imposition of sanctions against countries that the U.S. is hostile to, runs the risk of jeopardizing the hegemony of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

According to SIPRI, global military spending will reach a new record high of $2,240 billion in 2022.

A new report out from the National Center for Health Statistics finds that U.S. maternal deaths have increased by an alarming 40% since 2020.

While discussing about primary accumulation of capital, Marx did refer to a process of alienating direct producers from the means of production and this has been done by the use of coercion.

Here are three examples of criminal misuse of enormous sums of money that could meet human needs, but instead are spent underwriting terrible violence and bolstering corporate profits.

One of the central insights emerging from research on degrowth and climate mitigation is that universal public services are crucial to a just and effective transition.

New data show the wealthiest Americans have stashed $2 trillion in offshore tax havens, as the government relaxes efforts to combat tax evasion.

Except in war-time, capitalism invariably seeks to control inflation by creating a recession; and this is so even when the inflation has been caused by an autonomous increase in capitalists’ profit-margins which are downward inflexible and hence would not be reduced by a recession.

Western sanctions imposed on Iran, Russia, Syria, and in fact any country that refuses to be driven by Western will, have motivated many countries in the world to search seriously for ways and means to liberate their destinies from Western hegemony.

Before the pandemic was announced by the World Health Organisation in March 2020, the poorer nations of the world already struggled with seriously high—and unpayable—levels of debt.

Before it collapsed and its billionaire depositors were bailed out by the U.S. government, Silicon Valley Bank successfully lobbied Congress to remove regulations on it. A senator admitted, “I understand why Americans are angry, even disgusted”.

This world needs revolutionaries who refuse orders to kill and exploit. Two midwives named Shifra and Puah were such revolutionaries. When a racist ruler asked them to limit the reproduction of slaves—out of fear of a slave uprising—they disobeyed.

The recent massive demonstrations against the Macron administration in France forcing through so-called pension reforms reveals the determined attempts of pro-capitalist governments in all the major economies to cut real wages when we are old and can no longer work.

THERE is a commonly-held view that while capitalism in its early stages brings about unemployment and hence an accentuation of poverty, this initial damage is subsequently reversed as it keeps growing

The universal premises of culture and politics have been subject to criticism from the moment that Enlightenment theories emerged. In postmodern theory, radical skepticism replaces judgement and makes universal speculation seem like either an absurd game or a violent imposition.