Subjects Archives: Capitalism

  • Terminate the U.S.-Bahrain Free Trade Agreement

      Excerpt: On January 11, 2006, the United States signed into law the U.S.-Bahrain Free Trade Agreement (FTA), which entered into force between the United States and Bahrain on August 1, 2006.  In light of the ongoing brutal repression of peaceful protest carried out by the police and armed forces of Bahrain and the Gulf […]

  • The Ecological Rift: A Radical Response to Capitalism’s War on the Planet

    John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York.  The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth.  Monthly Review Press, 2010.  544 pages. Climate change is often called the greatest environment threat facing humanity.  The threat is very real.  Unless we cut carbon pollution fast, runaway climate change will worsen existing environmental and social problems, and […]

  • Guy Hocquenghem on Homosexual Desire, Capitalism, and the Left

    Guy Hocquenghem.  The Screwball Asses.  Trans.  Noura Wedell.  Semiotext(e), 2010.  88 pp.  $12.95 “Speak to my ass.  My head is sick.” — Southern French proverb This little book was first published as an anonymous essay at the end of Félix Guattari’s Recherches no. 12, its March 1973 special issue titled Trois Milliards de Pervers [Three […]

  • Congratulations to the People of Iceland!

      10 April 2011 Congratulations to the people of Iceland! The Repudiate the Debt Campaign welcomes and applauds the decision of the people of Iceland to reject the bank bail-out that would subsidise the wealthy elite.  They showed great courage in rejecting the terms and conditions and in resisting the pressure from the European Union […]

  • The Revolutionary Rebellion in Egypt

    I said several days ago that the die was cast for Mubarak and that not even Obama could save him. The world knows what is taking place in the Middle East. The news is circulating at incredible speed. Politicians barely have time to read the cables coming in by the hour. Everyone is aware of […]

  • The Time Has Come To Do Something

    I shall relate a bit of history. When the Spanish “discovered” us five hundred years ago, the estimated population on the Island was no more than 200,000 inhabitants who were living in harmony with nature. Their main sources of food came from the rivers, lakes and seas rich in protein; they were also carrying out […]

  • Obama’s Speech in Arizona

    Yesterday I listened to him when he spoke at the University of Tucson where homage was being paid to the 6 people murdered and the 14 wounded in the Arizona massacre, especially the Democratic congresswoman for that state, seriously wounded by a gunshot to the head. It was the deed of an unbalanced person, drunk […]

  • A New Year for Capitalism

    “Happy New Swindle!” Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain.  The cartoon above was first published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 3 January 2011.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | Print

  • The Twilight of Capitalism?

    In recent years, radical geographer David Harvey has emerged as one of the leading theorists and popularizers of Marxian political economy in the English-speaking world.  In books such as The New Imperialism and A Brief History of Neoliberalism, as well as his popular online courses in Volume I of Marx’s Capital, Harvey has articulated a […]

  • Mancession: Gender, Occupational Segregation, and the Structural Transformation of Capitalism

      Paul Jay: Nancy Folbre, in her blog on the New York Times, wrote the following: “The Great Recession has sometimes been dubbed the Mancession because it drove unemployment among men higher than unemployment among women.”  So how is this affecting families?  How is this affecting the future outlook for the population as a whole […]

  • Capitalism: An Obsolete System

      Listen to the interview with Samir Amin: Can you tell me very briefly what your book Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism? is about? The title of my book is indicative of the intention.  The title, in a provocative way, is Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism in Crisis?  As […]

  • A Transfer of National Debt to the ECB and a European New Deal

      Summary Cutting debt, deficits and wages poses a major crisis for both European governments and the European project.  The ETUC calls for a twin strategy to stabilise the current crisis by (1) transferring a major share of national debt to the ECB and for (2) net European bond issues to finance the European Economic […]

  • A Colossal Madhouse

    This is what the G-20 meeting that started yesterday in Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea, has been turned into. Many readers, saturated with acronyms, may wonder: What is the G-20? This is one of the many miscreations concocted by the most powerful empire and its allies, who also created the G-7: the United States, Japan, […]

  • Emerging Markets Confront QE2: Capital Controls, Reserve Accumulation, or Both?

      Paul Jay: You recently wrote a piece in the Guardian.  The title is “Who Pays the Bill for the Fed’s QE2?  By Depressing US Interest Rates, Quantitative Easing Forces Developing Countries to Defend Their Currencies at Crippling Cost.”  What do you mean by that? Kevin P. Gallagher: One of the unintended effects of QE2 […]

  • Strong Unions Are the Best Hope inside Capitalism: Interview with Michael D. Yates

    The San Jose Mine incident in Chile has brought back old questions about labor and capital.  About those questions, raised by the 33 miners’ struggle to survive, I interviewed Michael D. Yates, Associate Editor of Monthly Review.  Yates was for many years professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, USA.  He is […]

  • The Paradox of Capitalism

    John Maynard Keynes, though bourgeois in his outlook, was a remarkably insightful economist, whose book Economic Consequences of the Peace was copiously quoted by Lenin at the Second Congress of the Communist International to argue that conditions had ripened for the world revolution.  But even Keynes’ insights could not fully comprehend the paradox that is […]

  • The Empire from Inside (Part Five)

    CHAPTERS 28 and 29 Obama came down from the residence and saw Biden.  Biden advised him:  “What you’re about to do is a presidential order; it is no longer an issue of continuing a discussion. This is not what you think. This is an order. Without them, we’re locked into in Vietnam”. Obama answered: “I’m […]

  • Riding Capitalism to the Bottom: Why Republicans Gain as the Economy Falters

      Overlooked in the recent rise of the Tea Party and the Republican Right is the way these groups have learned how to grow and thrive on the failures of capitalism.  The Democrats, in contrast, remain tied to its successes.  With capitalism performing particularly poorly at present, it is no wonder that the Right is […]

  • Actually Existing Capitalism

    Michael Norton (of Harvard Business School) and Dan Ariely (of Duke) have released results (pdf) from a series of experiments they did in 2005 on the subject of wealth inequality.  They asked individuals in a nationally representative online panel to (1) estimate the current US distribution of wealth and (2) “build a better America” by […]

  • The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis This Time

    Paper prepared for the American Sociological Association Meetings in Atlanta, August 16th, 2010. There are many explanations for the crisis of capital that began in 2007.  But the one thing missing is an understanding of “systemic risks.”  I was alerted to this when Her Majesty the Queen visited the London School of Economics and asked […]