Subjects Archives: Capitalism

  • Enjoy capitalism by any means.

    Neo-liberal capitalism and its crisis

    “Neo-liberal capitalism” is the term used to describe the phase of capitalism where restrictions on the global flows of commodities and capital, including capital in the form of finance, have been substantially removed.

  • Sustainable development and inequality

    Sustaining neoliberal capital through socio-economic rights

    In a 2013 contribution aimed at influencing the post-2015 development agenda, seventeen UN Special Rapporteurs recommended that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) should include a goal on the provision of social protection floors.

  • Video of Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy Conference: Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence H. Summers.

    Laughter is the best medicine

    Only mainstream macroeconomists could possibly have thought that capitalism is self stabilizing. The rest of us—who have read Marx and Keynes…—actually knew something about the roots of capitalist instability.

  • Greece for sale

    ‘Leftist’ PM hails Trump in hopes to bind Greece to U.S. imperialism

    The meeting was seen by many in the Greek left as an “unprecedented manifestation of subordination to the U.S. imperialists,” who backed violent Greek monarchists and military juntas throughout the Cold War.

  • Top Companies

    Dimensions of economic power: today’s key corporations

    The images below are from a lecture I gave to at SOAS, London University, on 18 October. This was part of a series organised by the SOAS Economics Department, and my lecture covered the forms taken by corporate power today, focusing on Apple, Google/Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon and Alibaba.

  • Attendees of the School of Ecology Mauritius 2016

    Richard York in Mauritius discussing the Anthropocene and ecological rift

    A capitalist system cannot aim at responsible production that will reduce the negative impact on our future, and this is why we need a system change! This was the main theme of the second presentation of the day, done by Richard York. He exposed this concept through 6 different perspectives.

  • Gears.

    In defense of old materialism

    There was only once, in the final year of my PhD, that my supervisor and I butted heads. I had just submitted my fourth chapter for her review and, because I was living in another city at the time, she sent me an email saying we needed to speak on the phone urgently.

  • "Hurry! Buy More Stuff!" sign at protest.

    Capitalism’s moral maze

    Life as a consumer is very different to what we’re told.

  • Homeless after Sept. 24, 2017 earthquakes in Mexico

    The Mexican earthquakes in perspective

    Mexico suffered two powerful earthquakes in September 2107. The first, with magnitude 8.2 took place on September 7. With its epicenter off the Pacific coast of southern Mexico, it caused damage mainly in the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca. The second took place on September 19 and had a magnitude of 7.1, with its epicenter about 75 miles (120 kilometers) southeast of Mexico City, damaged the surrounding area, including Mexico City.

  • Das Kapital Karl Marx

    Soft shell, hard core: on the 150th anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1

    In bourgeois economic theory, competition, commodity production, profit seeking, and growth express something like the human essence. They are ahistorical constants, not the results of specifically capitalist relations that have historically emerged and can therefore be overcome. This is exactly what makes Marx’s critique of economics highly topical.

  • “Marx was not a profet nor a creator of uthopias, he was a rigorous theoricist” claims the professor / Credit: Youtube

    Capital is not a bible nor a cookbook”, says José Paulo Netto

    The work of Karl Marx, Capital, considered “the Bible” of the revolution, was first published 150 years ago. Many political and ideological battles are fought until this day in the name of the German intellectual and his biggest work.

  • Past continuous: Karl Marx’s Capital can help unravel the perplexities of modern-day capitalism

    On September 14, it will be exactly 150 years since the publication of Capital: Critique of Political Economy, the first volume of Karl Marx’s epochal Das Kapital. The historicity of the book can be gauged by the fact that this first of three bulky tomes was published by a Hamburg publisher two years after the American Civil War but well above a decade before the incandescent bulb was invented. Capital however, literally acted as the bulb that shone a light on many a way.

  • Capitalism by Sergej Bag

    Awareness of the non-viability of capitalism grows with each passing day

    In Marx there is a concept of an alternative to capitalism that provides a foundation for the needed effort to reinvigorate anti-capitalist movements. But a richer, more adequate understanding of socialism that addresses the realities of contemporary capitalism today still awaits us.

  • James Baldwin

    Forgetting to remember

    It is a devastating fact that James Baldwin is our contemporary; so much so, that the matter of his relevance seems either pressing or redundant depending on to whom one speaks. Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, a “cinematic séance” (The Guardian), is being taken as the completion of Baldwin’s unfinished Remember This House, […]

  • Illustration: Andrzej Krauze

    After neoliberalism, what next?

    We may be living through one of those moments in history that future historians will look back on as a watershed, a period of flux that marked a transition to quite different economic and social arrangements. Unfortunately, in human history a ‘moment’ can be a very long time.

  • Black Workers Power

    Does David Roediger disagree with Ellen Meiksins Wood?

    How does race relate to class in capitalism? Is it intrinsic and essential to the reproduction of capital, or merely an accidental feature of particular capitals? In this recent essay by Richard Seymour, and originally published on his Patreon, Seymour considers a debate within Marxism on the relationship between class, race and capitalism.

  • Toilet paper money roll

    The mega rich are getting mega richer

    The indirect effect of ​the increase in income inequality is economically more injurious than the erosion of company earnings or a stock market downturn.

  • The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) media manipulation

    The American empire and its media

    Largely unbeknownst to the general public, many media executives and top journalists of almost all major U.S. news outlets, political and business magazines, public broadcasters and press agencies have long been members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

  • Eugene Victor Debs

    Eugene Debs and the Kingdom of Evil

    Eugene Victor Debs was not only the builder of the social movement in America but arguably the most important political figure of the 20th century, before being crucified by the capitalist class when he and hundred of thousands of followers became a potent political threat. The most notable moments of Debs life were the railroad strikes in 1894, his campaign for Congress in 1916 until he was arrested under the Sedition Act by President Wilson and finally his speech moments before his sentencing in 1918.

  • Revenue effect of proposals related to the Trump Administration's 2017 tax plan

    Trump’s tax cuts would give the poor $40 each and the ultrarich $940,000

    When challenged on the numbers for its tax proposals, the Trump administration has insisted that they’ll lead to large-scale economic growth, which can largely offset the cost. The TPC finds that this isn’t the case.