Subjects Archives: Economic Theory

Spending cuts, deregulation, outsourcing: between them they have turned a state supposedly there to protect and support citizens into a machine to make money for the rich while punishing the poor. It’s never described like that, of course. Class warfare is passed off as book-keeping. Accountability is tossed aside for “commercial confidentiality”, while profiteering is dressed up as economic dynamism. One courtesy we should pay the victims of Grenfell is to drop the glossy-brochure euphemisms. Let’s get clear what happened to them: an act of social murder, straight out of Victorian times.

Populism has emerged as the latest bad word in the liberal commentary on current politics in the West. The understanding is simple. Populist politicians are supposed to appeal to the ‘people’ and stoke their jealousy against those who are economically, socially and politically successful. Another word used in liberal discourse to identify extreme right wing is ‘post truth’, designated as the word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. The implication is that popular opinion now is easily swayed by emotionally charged rhetoric and fake news having no factual basis. The claim that this is happening only now is odd.

If accumulating wealth is the basic objective of capitalism, organising production using wage labour is only one of the ways it can be achieved. What finance does is to open an alternative route to reach the same objective, that is via transaction.

Why is the cause of abnormally high corporate profit margins in the US. The phenomenon is amongst other things upsetting the standard notion that profits are mean reverting to historic averages. Jeremy Grantham (of the global investment management firm, GMO) puts the cause down to three other factors: increased monopoly power, increased political power and increased brand power.

Joan Acker, who died on June 22, 2016, was one of the foremost socialist feminists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  Her work about gender and class drew much of its creativity from a continual though uneasy engagement between feminism and Marxism.  She was one of the initial subscribers to Monthly Review, beginning […]

  The Phenomenal Drain of Profits Beginning in the 1970s, Puerto Rico’s economy began to suffer a drain of profits, to the point where the measure of total income produced in the island, the Gross Domestic Product, began to separate dramatically from the measure of income that residents own, the Gross National Product or GNP. […]

  Since at least the beginning of this year, the project of achieving a decent, reasonable Europe had set its eyes on Greece.  I say nothing of radically transforming Europe into something just and fair and ecologically sound — that prospect is far beyond the present horizon — but hopes that Europe could slowly turn […]

Samir Amin is director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal. His books published by Monthly Review Press include The Liberal Virus, The World We Wish to See, The Law of Worldwide Value, and, most recently, The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism. This article was translated from the French by Shane Mage. 1. Let me begin by saying that I […]

The world today is witnessing a rather novel phenomenon, namely a pervasive tendency towards political uprisings by the urban middle class.  Not just the leaders, but even the bulk of the participants in such uprisings are educated, are reasonably well-off, and make extensive use of social media channels for keeping in touch with one another. […]

  Bandera de la república popular de España en Atenas, entre las canciones Bella Ciao y Bandiera Rossa. #Syriza pic.twitter.com/HuVaAfO3Dg — ALFON (@TxabierAlonso) January 25, 2015 As a communist, if I were Greek I would certainly be active in the KKE (Communist Party of Greece) and this Sunday the party would have had my vote.  […]

I. The Piketty Argument Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-first Century embodies an immense amount of empirical research into the distribution of wealth and income across the population for a number of advanced capitalist countries going back for over two centuries.  In particular Piketty has made extensive use of tax data for the first […]

  On 10 June 2014 FIFA released a “Frequently Asked Questions” pamphlet “Setting the Record Straight” on what it purports to be some misconceptions about FIFA’s role and the socio-economic impact of the FIFA World Cup.  The release of the pamphlet is significant as it is the first time that FIFA has been forced by […]

  When I first read Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, it was 1967 and I was doing my last book report for the nuns at Holy Family High.  I would graduate in June but not without making some kind of statement about how angry I was to have been forced to attend this school.  I was […]

Thomas Piketty‘s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a six hundred and eighty-five page tome that definitively characterizes the empirical pattern of income and wealth inequality in capitalist economies over the past two hundred and fifty years, and especially over the last one hundred.  It also documents the grotesque rise of inequality over the past […]

If hundreds of newspaper and online reports are to be believed, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Agency have proven that western civilization will collapse unless we radically reduce inequality and shift to renewable resources. That would be important news if it were true.  Is it? The first person to say so was Nafeez Ahmed, a […]

  Numsa General Secretary’s Presentation to the Cape Town Press Club, February 11, 2014 I speak to you today with a powerful and united mandate from 341,150 metalworkers. They made their views extremely clear in our workers’ parliament in December last year — the parliament we called the Numsa Special National Congress.  In that parliament […]

  CJP: What began as a financial crisis in 2007 has become one of the biggest unemployment crises in the advanced capitalist world.  Could this perhaps mean that the crisis of 2007-08 was not actually caused by finance itself but had its underlying causes in the real economy? JBF: No one doubts that it was […]

  Do you think Marxism is still relevant today? If so, which parts? I think that Marxism is completely relevant for understanding capitalism now. It’s an error to think that capitalism has changed and that therefore we have to change Marxism. Marx grasped the nature of capitalism; and, although capitalism has changed in some of […]

  “The Third World Network and Jubilee are partnering today to stand up against vulture fund activity, stand up for Argentina, in this incredibly important court case that has massive repercussions for all countries around the world to be able to protect themselves from this kind of litigation in the courts by holdout vulture funds. […]

The German taxpayers should be happy to have SYRIZA in Greece, says economist Yanis Varoufakis in an interview.  Greece is not unwilling to reform.

ZEIT ONLINE: Mr. Varoufakis, the Greeks say they want to keep the euro but vote for SYRIZA and its leader Alexis Tsipras, whose plan could lead to an exit from the monetary union. How does that work?

Yanis Varoufakis: SYRIZA also wants Greece to remain in the eurozone. But, at the same time, it wants to renegotiate the austerity program, because it doesn’t work. Just about everyone who knows anything about economics knows that by now.