Subjects Archives: Marxism

“By its nature,” Marx writes in the climactic passage of a magnificent but very dense section of the Grundrisse, capital “posits a barrier to labor and value-creation in contradiction to its tendency to expand them boundlessly. And in as much as it both posits a barrier specific to itself, and on the other side equally drives over and beyond every barrier, it is the living contradiction.”

It’s now official: workers around the world are falling behind. The International Labor Organization’s (ILO) latest Global Wage Report finds that, excluding China, real (inflation-adjusted) wages grew at an annual rate of just 1.1% in 2017, down from 1.8% in 2016. That is the slowest pace since 2008.

Yesterday I had a conversation about my work, about how and why I started studying inequality more than 30 years ago, what was my motivation, how it was  to work on income inequality in an officially classless (and non-democratic) society, did the World Bank care about inequality etc.

The honest answer is that I was asked to write something reflecting on Trump by my then editor at Scribe. In the immediate wake of the 2016 presidential election, many people were dumbfounded by the news out of the U.S. How could such an odious figure–such a transparent bigot and fraud–win power?

How to respond to the rise of national populism? The phenomenon is evident not only in Trump’s U.S. but throughout Europe, as shown in this book’s comprehensive review of changes in mass opinion. The book also attempts to provide a solution to the problem, one that will defend democracy, but in doing so it inadvertently highlights the bankruptcy of the liberal outlook.

Samir Amin’s life resembled that of Karl Marx: a man without a homeland, but one whose home was a chosen commitment to a historical project.

The first model is a radical critique of all forms of bourgeois right, including employment rights, which are considered to constitute an ideological reflection of the capitalist mode of production, and therefore an inseparable companion of exploitation.

It has been almost a year since we got off the ground. Our offices across the world humming with activity. You have received forty-four newsletters from us, eleven dossiers and one notebook and one working document. More is on the way as we enter our second calendar year.

Bolsonaro has his eyes on Washington and the Trump administration, which is looking to the Jair-Eduardo pair, father and son, to facilitate its attacks on Cuba and Venezuela.

Political commentators see AMLO as a bigger threat than Bolsonaro.

On trial with other members of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats in 1849, Karl Marx argued in a Cologne court that their prosecution was based upon “laws which the Crown itself has trampled into the dirt”.

Since November 17, France has been witnessing the massive Gilets jaunes or ‘Yellow Vests’ protests against the anti-working class policies of the Emmanuel Macron government. The protests against the rising economic burden on the people are also spreading to many other European countries.

I think the left should stop talking about ‘neoliberalism’, as I argue in a recent journal article published in Capital & Class.

It is sad to see how completely misrepresented Adam Smith (1723-1790) is when pundits call upon him to vindicate neoliberalism and the status quo. It seems many have not really bothered to read his works.

In 1972 feminists from Italy, England, and the United States convened in Padova, Italy, for a two-day conference. Associated with the extra-parliamentary left, anti-colonial struggles, and alternatives to the communist party, these activists composed a declaration for action, the “Statement of the International Feminist Collective.”

Susan Ram, who is writing a book on the French Left for LeftWord Books (New Delhi), has a crisp assessment of the yellow vest (gilets jaunes) movement and of its fifth week of demonstration–Act V Macron Démission (Macron Resign). It is anger and determination that defines the yellow vest protest.

A new book argues that words like “innovation” are doing more than telling you who to avoid at parties.

In his brief Dec. 10 television address, French President Emmanuel Macron outlined the measures aimed at calming the popular anger of the “Yellow Vests”

U.S. elected leaders, and those that work for them, think their constituents are far more conservative than they are. The good news is that this means there is far more support for a progressive political agenda than one might think.

Co-sponsored by SFU’s Institute for the Humanities, School for International Studies, Department of History, & Department of Sociology and Anthropology.