Subjects Archives: Capitalism

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.

Discussions in the forthcoming COP26 should focus on democratisation of climate finance that enables procedural climate justice.

A discussion with John Bellamy Foster, one of the world’s leading figures in Marxian ecological theory.

Resilience cannot be restored without public spending, but the rentier business plan is to minimize taxes by shrinking the government, especially by privatizing its public utilities and other functions to create opportunities for charging monopoly rents, and to oppose taxation of economic rent.

Healy’s exquisite book applies several recent frameworks of alienation to two groups of workers–IT workers and academics.

Journalists from the U.S. and Europe have warned that the summer of 2021 should be a wakeup call on climate catastrophe. Rightfully so.