Subjects Archives: Political Economy

This guide is designed to help understand the central ideas in Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review, (2017)

Many activists in the United States are working to build a movement for a Green New Deal transformation of the economy. Not surprisingly, a growing number look to the World War II conversion of the U.S. economy from civilian to military production for inspiration and policy ideas. 

Over 40% of Black and Latinx households pay more than 30% of their income on rent, compared with 25% of white households.

A Q&A on capitalism, media, and climate.

On 25 February 2021, the Chinese government announced that extreme poverty had been abolished in China, a country of 1.4 billion people. This historic victory is a culmination of a seven-decade-long process that began with the Chinese Revolution of 1949.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” — Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’

Despite facing the world’s worst pandemic of the last century, rich countries in the World Trade Organization (WTO) have blocked efforts to enable more affordable access to the means to fight the pandemic.

Urban crime is the golden child of local media, as recent FAIR coverage (6/21/21) has shown. But as FAIR’s Julie Hollar recently noted, the amount of attention given to a topic does not always reflect the seriousness of the situation.

We are witnessing today the final days of a militaristic empire, the rapid descent of an obsolete failed United States. There is nothing unique about America. Empires rise and empires fall throughout time memorial. It is empirically calculated that the average civilization only lasts 340 years. 

The answer is plain to see: the two explanations are not contradictory. A combination of the two enables us to understand what has been happening right before our eyes.

Warnings about how the capitalist mode of production is putting pressure on the earth’s ability to handle all forms of stress have continued to come at an increasing pace.

The other side of ecocide thrives in the fertile ground of radical socioecological theory.

The first decades of the 21st century have been a gilded age for the world’s super-rich. While the mass of humanity has struggled through successive economic crises, accelerating climate and environmental breakdown and now a devastating global pandemic, the billionaire class’s wealth has piled up to ever more dizzying heights.

As rioters target supermarkets, activists call on the government to help those who cannot survive amid rising prices and mass unemployment.

Contrary to rhetoric from Democrats and Republicans, the U.S. has an economic interest in trade and peace with China

This small island of 11 million people has created five vaccine candidates and sent its medical workers through the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade to heal people around the world.

The New Left is generally seen globally as emerging from the aftermath of the “revelations” about Stalin in Khrushchev’s “secret speech”’ at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in early 1956, and the reaction to the Soviet invasion of Hungary later that same year.

The masses of Tokyo want to postpone or cancel the games, but the government says it’s the IOC’s decision, not the host country’s, sovereignty be damned.

In bourgeois society a violation of property rights is the supreme injustice. Hybrids provided a solution in agriculture. Commercial hybrids decrease the yield of the following generation. This means that farmers have to renew their seed every year. Hence, hybrids create a perpetual market for seed.

Between 30 June and 2 July 2021, the United Nations and other multilateral organisations held the Generation Equality Forum in Paris (France).