Subjects Archives: Capitalism

Dear friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. ‘[T]here is great intellectual poverty on the part of the right wing’, Héctor Béjar says in our latest dossier, A Map of Latin America’s Present: An Interview with Héctor Béjar (February 2022). ‘There is a lack of right-wing intellectuals everywhere’. Béjar speaks […]

It is official: we are getting ready for another round of industrial action in the UK higher education sector.

A bimonthly podcast hosted by Professor David Harvey that looks at capitalism through a Marxist lens.

Quentin Beresford’s book Wounded Country: The Murray-Darling Basin—a contested history, published in September 2021, is a warning. State officials, politicians and agribusinesses risk turning Australia’s premier food bowl—the Murray-Darling Basin, which covers 14 percent of the Australian mainland—into desert.

Many ecologists, activists and academics argue that an obsession with economic growth is the cause of our current ecological crisis and a commitment to “degrowing” the economy is the solution.

We are delighted to announce the online Spanish translations of pamphlets/ manifestos published by Daraja Press and Monthly Review Essays. These pamphlets are parts of the series, Moving Beyond Capitalism – Now! and Thinking Freedom.

On Jan. 24, stocks were falling, with the S&P 500 Index down 3.8%, the Dow Industrial Average down 2.7% and the Nasdaq Composite down 4.5%. The widespread sell-off for the Dow and the S&P 500 started on the second trading day in January; and for the Nasdaq in November. The Nasdaq is down nearly 20% from its high in November.

Platform power is often traced to markets, implying anti-trust action. The source, and the solution, lie elsewhere.

Capitalism jeopardizes the survival of humanity on earth. It reduces the price of the labour of reproducing labour power when it cannot make women do it for free within the family. How can we overcome it while putting the defence of life at the centre of our concerns?

Lenin’s theory of socialism directly derives from the views of Marx and Engels, and it is manifest in his famous work, ‘The State and Revolution.’

One of the most important arguments advanced by John Maynard Keynes, the renowned economist, was that the operation of financial markets under capitalism is deeply flawed.

Smith begins with Friedrich Pollock’s definition of automation as a ‘technique of industrial production [in which] the machines are “controlled” by machines’, and shows that this trend of automation, while increasing labor productivity in the industrial and manufacturing sector, is also the reason for a lack of automation in the service sector.

Labor journalist and NewsGuild organizer Chris Brooks sat down with a group of New York City nurses and teachers to talk about how the institutions they work for are collapsing and what labor activists can do about it.

The unexpected may occur, within the quantum perspective assumed by the new cosmology: the current suffering due to the systemic crisis will not be in vain; it is accumulating benign energies that will make a leap to another, higher-order.

In the United States there are still four million persons who remain unemployed compared to before the pandemic; and yet the Biden administration’s attempt to stimulate the economy has already run into a crisis with the re-emergence of inflation not just in that country but elsewhere in the capitalist world as well.

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.