Subjects Archives: Capitalism

A short while ago I dealt with the United States’ plans to impose the absolute superiority of its air force as an instrument of domination on the rest of the world. I mentioned the project that by 2020 they would have more than a thousand latest generation bombers and F-22 and F-35 fighter planes in their fleet of 2500 military aircrafts. In twenty more years, every single one of their war planes will be robot-operated.

[Edited to add: See recommended movie link at bottom of post]

During recent weeks, the current president of the United States has insisted in demonstrating that the crisis is abating as a result of his efforts to confront the serious problem that the United States and the world inherited from his predecessor.

The concept of nation emerged from the combination of common elements such as history, language, culture, costumes, laws, institutions and others related to the material and spiritual life of human communities.

  The Media, the Left, and Power Tanner Mirrlees: Why do you think it is important for progressives to understand the media and participate in media democracy struggles? Robert McChesney: The media is one of the key areas in society where power is exercised, reinforced, and contested.  It is hard to imagine a successful left […]

The media, academics, and politicians often speak and act as if government economic policies can or will “solve” or “end” or “overcome” capitalism’s crises.  They don’t.  They never have.  The often-cited counter-example,  FDR’s New Deal program in the 1930s,  failed to get the US out of the Great Depression.  World War 2 finally did that. […]

I read and reread data and articles written by smart personalities, some better known than others, who publish in various media outlets drawing the information from sources nobody questions.

  The exit from the systemic crisis of capitalism needs to be political, and “a socialist project can mature in this turbulence.”  So says the Argentine economist, philosopher, and sociologist Claudio Katz, who also warns that the “global economic situation is very serious and is going to have to hit bottom, and now we are […]

Capitalism has generated recurring “crises” everywhere and throughout its history.  It alternates bursts of growth and prosperity with crisis periods when many workers lose jobs and homes, bankruptcies close enterprises, production shrinks, and governments reduce public services.  Growth periods almost always promote speculation, overproduction, inflation, and excess debts that crises then erase or even reverse.  […]

On Thursday the 4th of June, at the Islamic University of Al-Azhar in Cairo, Obama gave a speech of special interest to those of us who are closely following his political actions given the enormous might of the superpower he leads. I cite his very own words to indicate what I think are the basic ideas he expressed, thus summarizing his speech to save time. Not only do we have to know that he spoke but also what he said.

Yesterday on May 31st, an AFP dispatch read: “Cuba has accepted to reopen negotiations with the United States about migration and direct mail service, a new signal of the thaw that is happening just before an Organization of American States (OAS) Summit where the Cuban situation will dominate conversations.

Part 1 Part 2 Minqi Li is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Utah and the author of The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy among other publications.  This lecture was delivered at the Marxist School of Sacramento on 21 May 2009. 

Chavez is an indefatigable educator. He does not hesitate in describing what capitalism means. One by one he takes apart all its lies. He is relentless.

Five days ago I read a press report stating that Ban Ki-moon would appoint Bill Clinton as his special envoy for Haiti.

This much is clear: not in a long time has capitalism been so critically questioned in the US and “socialism” so widely debated as a social alternative.  The left can and should seize this moment.  One part of doing that is to formulate a new program — including a new definition of socialism — that […]

One of the central paradoxes in economic theory relates to the hostility that financial interests in a modern capitalist economy systematically display towards any policy of enlarged State expenditure financed by borrowing, even though such expenditure increases capitalists’ profits and wealth. Let us suppose that the government undertakes a larger borrowing-financed public expenditure programme, and […]

The keynote address at the “Climate Change, Social Change” conference (organized by Green Left Weekly), Sydney, Australia, 12 April 2008. This address became the basis for John Bellamy Foster, “Ecology and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism” (Monthly Review, November 2008), which in turn became the last chapter of The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with […]

There are not two different opinions on the issue of A H1N1.

Our world is not only threatened by the cyclical economic crises which are ever more serious and frequent. Unemployment, bankruptcy, and the huge losses in goods and wealth are inseparable companions of the blind market laws which govern the world economy today. Neo-liberalism proscribes any interference by the State, considering it a disturbing element for the economy, as if the domestic order, the army, health, education, culture, science, the courts, the judges, and many other activities could exist without the State and its laws.

Tomorrow is International Workers’ Day.

Karl Marx called to unity: “Workers of the world unite”, although many of the poor were not workers. Lenin, who was even more far-reaching, made a call to the peasants and the colonized peoples for them to struggle together under the leadership of the proletariat.

  As people in the U.S. and around the world evaluate President Barack Obama’s first one-hundred days, many — that is, those who truly wanted a break from the racist, militarist, anti-working class policies of the Bush regime — are coming to the conclusion that the ‘change’ his campaign promised seems to have turned into […]