Subjects Archives: Capitalism

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

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.