-
Billionaires’ net worth grows to $10.2 trillion during pandemic
The super-rich increased their combined fortunes by 27.5% during the worst of the market turmoil from April through July.
-
Five Centuries of Pillage and Resistance: Latin America and Africa
The tragedy being the suffering Latin America has borne, the optimism being in the recognition that this is not the region’s natural or inevitable destiny, but has been imposed on it through its subjugation to the capitalist system, and is therefore capable of being changed.
-
Ecosocialism: an alternative to global capitalism
Over the past four decades or so, various leftists have become more sensitive to the environmental degradation in developed and developing capitalist societies and post-revolutionary societies, particularly in the former Soviet Union and, in recent times, China.
-
Beyond Plague Urbanism
Over the centuries, humans have survived tragedy through the incredible stoicism of not moving, of standing one’s ground, of resisting, of engaging in tremendous creativity. Perhaps we can use the time alone to think collectively, to reflect together on how we might reconstruct the public realm of our cities.
-
Disability, Covid and Capitalism
With phrases like “protect the vulnerable” & “underlying conditions” currently all around us, disability activist Ruth Flood looks at the horrendous treatment of disabled people under capitalism.
-
Indigenous solutions to California’s capitalist conflagrations
Colonial timber management and capitalist land use has produced the wildfire crisis we see today. Prescribed Indigenous burning is a viable preventative solution to high severity wildfire but its success hinges on the fight by Indigenous socialists and grassroots organizers for Tribal sovereignty, land restitution, and the creation of a new prescribed fire workforce.
-
Marx, Engels and metabolic rift – Part Two
The development in 1909, by the German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch of a technique for taking Nitrogen out of the atmosphere to produce ammonia (NH3) allowed for the production of synthetic fertilisers (and explosives) on an industrial scale.
-
Capitalism, slavery, and economic white supremacy
What is at stake when we talk about the economics of North American slavery? Over the last 75+ years it has been whether capitalism superseded slavery or whether capitalism and slavery were co-constituted, capitalism to some extent relying on slavery.
-
Amidst pandemic, while billions struggle for survival, billionaires’ wealth tops $10 trillion
Billionaires are “smart” enough. Their wealth now, in this pandemic, tops trillions of dollars.
-
Marxism and intersectionality
Ashley Bohrer has provided this important piece of scholarship with her new book, Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism.
-
Mainstream economics today
Readers today will be more familiar with contemporary mainstream economics than with the mainstream economics of Marx’s day. So, let’s start there.
-
Why Modi’s government is not up to the task
The Modi regime believes that no matter how impoverished the people are their electoral support can always be won by promoting Hindutva and effecting a communal polarization. It is an utterly cynical view, but then, the present dispensation represents the acme of cynicism.
-
Review of Jairus Banaji A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism
For Jairus Banaji, theory and history are tightly interwoven: without history, theory ends up ‘bad abstraction’; without theory, the intelligibility of history is doomed to fail.
-
Tale of two capitalisms
Marxian economists recognize, just like mainstream economists, that capitalism has radically transformed the world in recent decades, continuing and in some cases accelerating long-term trends.
-
The revolutionary answers of C.L.R. James
The Black Lives Matter movement across the U.S. against police violence and racist inequality is one of the most dynamic political developments in years.
-
Times remain hard, especially for low-wage workers
The current economic crisis has hit workers hard. Unemployment rates remain high, with total weekly initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits continuing to grow.
-
The protracted crisis of capitalism
THERE is a commonly-held view that the current crisis in capitalism, which has resulted in a massive output contraction and increase in unemployment, is because of the pandemic; and that once the pandemic gets over, things will go back to “normal”.
-
‘What stage of capitalism is this?’ Hedge fund $3 billion richer thanks to wager on wildfire insurance claims
With over 100,000 people displaced by wildfires raging across California, Baupost Group collected more than $3 billion in July after betting on insurance claims against embattled utility company PG&E.
-
Under capitalism Black Lives are adrift and vulnerable
Post-Civil War arrangements by which the victorious North settled with the defeated slavocracy ensured that many Black people would not matter much and that some would die. A thousand or so were murdered in the South in 1866, reports W.E. B Du Bois.
-
“Information has value”: The political economy of information capitalism
The “Information Has Value” frame provides a welcome opening to discuss information capitalism, including the commodification of information, information labor, concentration of ownership, and audience data extraction/surveillance.