Subjects Archives: Capitalism

The world lost a trailblazing thinker and feminist this week. Professor and social activist Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, passed away at the age of 69.

Since 1901, December has been a time for Nobel Prizes. Only in 1969, as an afterthought, the Swedish Central Bank established the ‘Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’—a decision that was met with protests by some members of the Nobel family.

Twenty-five years ago, “degrowth” was conceived by its proponents as a “buzzword” carrying a vague ideological charge: Serge Latouche and his supporters said they wanted to “change the way people think” in order to “get out of the economy and development”… Today, degrowth is once again being debated, but on the basis of more rigorous premises.

Eugene V. Debs may be my all-time favorite American and Karl Marx my all-time favorite journalist. But my employer for a decade was The Wall Street Journal, and for another decade it was the Los Angeles Times.

Financial capital, once cut loose from its original role as a modest helper of a real economy of production to meet human needs, inevitably becomes speculative capital geared solely to its own self-expansion. In earlier times no one ever dreamed that speculative capital, a phenomenon as old as capitalism itself, could grow to dominate a national economy, let alone the whole world. But it has.

On 31 January, at the Bourse du travail in Paris, Frédéric Lordon debated with Thomas Piketty on his book ‘Capital and Ideology’, at the invitation of Les Amis de L’Humanité. The following text is Frédéric Lordon’s opening speech, with minimal revisions.

Thirty years ago, climate modeling scientists predicted exactly the global events–massive wildfires, intensified tropical storms, flooding and droughts–that we’re seeing right now.

Although Marx himself only mentioned the “base” and “superstructure” in (by my count) two of his works, the base-superstructure “problem” remains a source of serious contention for Marxists, our sympathizers, and our critics.

The Thanksgiving holiday is built around an insidious and false creation myth–that the so-called “settling” of North America was a peaceful and amicable process.

General tendencies, possible “leaps”

To date, the Canadian government has acted as a reliable ally in the U.S.’s New Cold War against China. The need for Canada to change course is dire, but prospects are grim. Canada needs to break with this dangerous path and set course for peace and cooperation with China.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) will soon decide on a conditional temporary waiver of Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).

You don’t have to read Marx to understand the lack of power workers have under capitalism.

Tracing the rise and the politics of asset manager capitalism.

Marx and Engels were witnesses to and keen analysts of the environmental problems inherent in nineteenth-century capitalism. They wrote about the depletion of coal reserves, the destruction of forests, and, especially, about diminishing soil fertility, which Foster recognizes was the most pressing issue of the day.

Senator Joe Manchin has emerged in recent weeks as the leading opponent of vital social programs to provide relief to working people in the areas of education, healthcare, the environment and much more.

Dialectical materialism combines two philosophical traditions: historical materialism formulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and dialectics, an idealist philosophy formulated by German philosopher Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of this historical moment. It includes a belief in the following: the efficiency of the free market and the deregulation and privatization of the public sector that markets require; tax reduction; abandoning the welfare state; and replacing the notion of the public good with a personal responsibility for one’s own welfare.

More than just bear it, capitalists today demand we love our exploitation. Sara Bennett reviews a new book on the new emotional demands on workers, arguing it aid us in our understanding of modern class relations.

How 16th century reformers fought privatization of land and capitalist agriculture.