Subjects Archives: Political Economy

In his latest book, Socialism or Extinction: The Meaning of Revolution in a Time of Ecological Disaster, Martin Empson neatly lays out his argument as to why the climate crisis cannot be solved under capitalism.

“The people of Afghanistan have been made to suffer doubly for a government they did not choose.”

The post-colonial state in India had two primary tasks before it: one was to overcome the hegemony of metropolitan capital, so that a development strategy in relative autonomy from imperialism could be pursued; the second was to attack landlordism both to free the agrarian population from its clutches, and to increase agricultural output for rapid industrialisation based on a growing home market.

According to the head of macro analysis at Saxo Bank, the only thing holding back the UK economy from turning into an emerging economy country, given the inflation and political instability, is the lack of a currency crisis.

— The stagflation outside of the United States will be very serious as capital flight to safety causes severe debt and foreign exchange crises in many parts of the world and developing countries face imported inflation due to the strong U.S. dollar, said economist Jayati Ghosh.

— The U.S. dollar hegemony, which has been so crucial in the United States’ own economic expansion, is going to become much more fragile in the future. There’s no question that an increasing number of countries and central banks “are going to think of alternative ways of keeping their reserves and it’s obvious it’s the logical thing to do,” she said.

With no national force with the vision and power to offer an emancipatory alternative to politics that turns neighbors against each other, the country is on a knife edge.

Dennis Meadows: Climate change, inflation, food shortages are symptoms of a bigger problem.

Money on the Left is thrilled to release English and Spanish transcripts from our Superstructure podcast with Daniel Rojas Medellin (@DanielRMed), now Coordinator of newly inaugurated President Gustavo Petro’s transition team (@petrogustavo), and Mexican economist Jesús Reséndiz Silva (@Tlacuachito). In the episode, co-hosts Andrés Bernal (@andresintheory) & Naty Smith (@orangeasm) speak with Medellin and Silva about what it means to think beyond economic orthodoxies in Latin America.

Last week, Republican Senator Ron Johnson called for ending Social Security and Medicare as entitlement programs, instead transferring them into the discretionary budget where they would be gutted.

The Putin-Erdogan meeting in Sochi has rapidly accelerated Russian-Turkish economic initiatives and financial ties. These include bypassing western sanctions, integrating money transfers, and trading outside the dollar.

As yours truly has reported repeatedly during the last couple of years, university students all over the world are increasingly beginning to question if the kind of economics they are taught–mainstream economics–really is of any value. Some have even started to question if economics is a science.

As the tension between the U.S. and China mounts as a fall-out of Nancy Pelosi’s provocative Taiwan visit, the technology war between the two is also taking a new turn.

As tensions between the United States and China rise, Washington is intent on contesting Beijing’s influence around the world, particularly in the Global South. The U.S. government has ramped up its efforts to influence international media and public opinion. In this new Cold War, South Africa is once again in the crosshairs.

The decision comes as Schumer is now the Senate’s #2 recipient of pharmaceutical industry campaign cash.

Democrats were set to mostly preserve, not close, a Wall Street tax loophole, before they dropped it entirely.

Capitalism comes into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”. So concludes Marx after a lengthy account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism near the end of Capital, Volume I.

According to an analysis by Elements Newsletter based on the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2022, roughly 43% of the world’s oil production came from just three countries in 2021 — the US, Saudi Arabia, and the Russian Federation. Together, these three countries produced more oil than the rest of the top 10 combined.

Fossil fuel firm’s profits are ‘an insult to families struggling to get by,’ TUC says.

Pivotal economic crises frequently evoke multiple explanations that are all correct while missing the point.

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR. Colonial-style currency board arrangements have enabled continuing imperialist exploitation decades after the end of formal colonial rule. Such neo-colonial monetary systems persist despite modest reforms.