Subjects Archives: Economic Theory

In her book titled The Accumulation of Capital, published in 1913, Rosa Luxemburg devoted an entire chapter to international loans in order to show how the great capitalist powers of the time used the credits granted by their bankers to the countries of the periphery to exercise economic, military and political domination on the latter.

Research has shown that the people most responsible for a warming planet were disproportionately the same people attending the summit and an increasing number of observers see climate change, inequality and capitalism as bound together.

The U.S. is currently enjoying another stock market boom which, if history is any guide, also stands to end in a bust. In the meantime, the boom is having a politically toxic effect by lending support to Donald Trump and obscuring the case for reversing the neoliberal economic paradigm.

U.S. CEOs not only draw the highest salaries (including bonuses and equity awards, etc.), but they are king of the hill when it comes to lording it over their employees, as illustrated by the high ratio of CEO to worker earnings.

Economic inequality in the United States and around the world is now so obscene, and has convinced more and more people to do something about it, that the business press has initiated a campaign to deny its very existence.

Alexandra Scaggs joins Money on the Left to discuss her experience covering the ongoing paradigm crisis in mainstream economics, central banking and finance—and why leftists should be paying close attention.

In what follows, I will first briefly summarize the core arguments of the book, which promises to provoke important discussions on the matter of limits and subjects. Then I will reflect on the fuzziness of the primarily cultural conceptualization of capitalism, and argue that neither self-limitation nor degrowth qualifies as a mode of production, such that they could constitute an alternative to capitalism.

“In the richest country in the history of the world, we have an obligation to turn this around and make sure our kids live healthier and better lives than we do.”

“Is that a big deal?”, some may ask. It is to those who have pushed for achieving the far-reaching liberalisation of trade in an unequal global order, first under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and then under the auspices of the agreements that established the WTO and defined and expanded its remit.

This December, we bring you a special Christmas episode of our program, featuring the enigmatic operator behind the increasingly popular Twitter account known as “Neoclassical Marxism,” or @NMarxism. @NMarxism is a deeply satirical Twitter project, which deploys Modern Monetary Theory and some very dark humor to critique the neoclassical economics and neoliberal assumptions that unconsciously […]

From Chile to Lebanon, young people are demonstrating—in street protests and voting booths—that they’ve had enough of being disciplined and punished by the current development model.

In this episode of Money on the Left, we speak with historian Alison Collis Greene about her book No Depression in Heaven with an eye toward contemporary debates around the Green New Deal. Subtitled The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta, Greene’s book critiques what she calls the […]

In 2018, one of the longest dry spells on record left part of the Rhine in Germany at record low levels for months, forcing freighters to reduce their cargo or stop using the river altogether. 

Jakob Feinig, assistant professor of human development at Binghamton University, joins Money on the Left to discuss the history of political organizing and activism around money in the United States, from the pre-Revolutionary period to the New Deal era. Characterized alternately by periods of widespread “silencing” and mass mobilization, the history of money politics that […]

Today, as the global economy flounders from crisis to crisis, Marx’s analysis of capitalism is the essential basis for a correct understanding of what is going on. Moseley’s book reaffirms key elements of this analysis.

Before turning to the subject matter at hand two abiding issues in Marxist thinking need to be addressed. First, when Marx inveighed against Utopian Socialist futuristic model building, he never intended it to become a mantra dissuading socialists from thinking practically about socialist institutional design.

Richard Reeves is right about one thing: time is crucial to capitalism’s legitimacy. The premise and promise of capitalism are that the future will be better than the present. And “if capitalism loses its lease on the future, it is in trouble.”

If we have little interest in the scholasticism and the baroque arcana of contemporary marxist theoretical debates, the wealth of marxist theory can be neither dismissed nor ignored. And debates around marxist inspired feminism are a case in point.

We are joined by Andrés Bernal, policy advisor to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and doctoral student at the New School for Public Engagement, Division of Policy Management and Environment. We speak with Bernal about his history with political organizing and the critical role he has come to play in the Modern Money movement, including the struggle for […]

Unfortunately for humanity, the naturalizing of capitalism by dominant mainstream neoclassical economics establishes a bulwark against the posing of vital economic questions which challenge capitalist rationality.