Subjects Archives: Political Economy

  • US-based socialist Tithi Bhattacharya responds to questions from rs21 on her new book about social reproduction theory.

    Capitalism’s life source: the domestic and social basis for exploitation

    Social reproduction theory (SRT) sounds quite intimidating, but the (rather grandiose) anthology of big words masks a relatively simple question: if capitalist production is fundamentally the production of commodities, and it is workers who produce such commodities, who ‘produces’ the worker?

  • Marx Library

    The productive base as the ground of society and history: Marx’s base-superstructure theory

    Base-Superstructure Theory (BST) is Marx’s guiding general theory, but is long misunderstood. Deeply embedded in a monumental corpus of system-challenging analysis, it has become lost in secondary interpretations with partial takes and opposed propagandas militating against coherent comprehension.

  • Planetary boundaries

    Capitalism, exterminism and the long ecological revolution

    teleSUR spoke to Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster about climate change & the need to fight for an ecosocialist, revolutionary alternative to the profit-driven world capitalist system.

  • Protest photo (Photo Credit: Amy Osika)

    Debt comes for us all

    “DON’T LET YOUR CHILDREN GO INTO CRIPPLING DEBT LIKE I HAVE!” I shout, as I and a group of students with SENS-UAW make our way to a major intersection just off Union Square. We wave signs, hoist our banner and merge into the crowd. We are protesting the new GOP tax bill, which will affect the lives of current, previous, and prospective students in critical and long-lasting ways.

  • Do Purchasing Power Parity exchange rates mislead on incomes? The case of China

    Ever since Larry Summers and Alan Heston produced what become known as the “Penn World Tables” comparing prices and thereby the purchasing power of currencies across countries, the urge to use some deflator of market exchange rates to compare incomes across countries has been strong.

  • Trump's Department of Labor proposes rule that lets employers steal employees' tips / Boing Boing

    Employers would pocket $5.8 billion of workers’ tips under Trump administration’s proposed ‘tip stealing’ rule

    On December 5, the Trump administration took its first major step toward allowing employers to legally pocket the tips earned by the workers they employ. The Department of Labor (DOL) released a proposed rule that would allow restaurants to take the tips that servers earn and share them with untipped employees such as cooks and dishwashers.

  • Evgeny Pashukanis

    Evgeny Pashukanis: Commodity-form theory of law

    Whether one believes that law is provided by God (Natural Law), is created by human intellect (Positivism), a gendered institution perpetuating patriarchy (Feminism) or the maintainer of the status quo against marginalised groups (Critical Legal Studies), undergirding those beliefs is the assumption that law is autonomous.

  • The American savings crisis, explained

    The American savings crisis, explained

    When you lay all that out, Americans’ terrible saving rate stops looking like such a mystery. In fact, it looks downright rational.

  • Aristocrats (Photo Credit: shutterstock)

    The financial aristocrats will eat themselves

    Even as far back as 1894, Karl Marx’s work saw that capitalism would devour its agents, writes DIEGO FUSARO.

  • Maraget Thatcher

    The crisis in neoliberalism and its ramifications

    The neoliberal model that has dominated mainstream politics and economics for decades is in crisis.… Mass dissatisfaction has joined with the growing realisation by the managers of the capitalist system that neoliberal policies are incapable of dragging the world economy out of the rut in which it now finds itself 10 years after the onset of the global financial crisis.

  • Dave Beech, Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Boston: Brill, 2015)

    Review of Art and Value by Dr. Nizan Shaked

    Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics reveals the irreconcilable differences between the Marxist economic definition of the term ‘value’ and its other uses in relation to the art object. It corrects the faulty assumption that rare or historical objects bear intrinsic value, symptomatic of capitalist worldview. Beech’s analysis of art’s value-form is critical to unpacking the double ontological condition of art as both an object of collective symbolic value and a hoard of monetary value, since the two operate in mutually exclusive spheres, yet function to constitute one another. The book can help us understand the capitalist sleight of hand that allows art to flicker between two forms of being, making profit appear as value, and value appear as significance (and vice versa), the toggling between the two facilitating the transfer of commonly held symbolic value in support of the individual accumulation of wealth.

  • The 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances paints a grim picture of working class finances

    Martin Hart-Landsberg takes a look at the tragedy of what life is like for the working class. Allowing for us to directly see what we already know, that US capitalism works to enrich the few at the expense of the many.

  • How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System by Wolfgang Streeck, New Delhi: Juggernaut Books, 2017; pp 272, ₹499 (paperback).

    The future of capitalism

    Looking at the present and future system of capitalism, there is a vital crisis at the heart of it all. Democratic capitalism, starting out in the 18th century, has had its ups and downs but even Marx, Keynes, Rosa Luxemberg, and Kondratieff have all failed to establish theories to break out of the capitalist system.

  • Capitalism and punishment. Figure 1.

    Capitalism and punishment

    David Russio takes a look into the punishments (deaths) that come from capitalism. For is it really bringing balance to the destruction that it causes. That seems to be the loaded question we all know the answer to.

  • Paramilitaries on the Colombia-Venezuela border

    “Colombia is safe for business, but not for people”

    Murders of trade unionists and social leaders, paramilitary activity, coca production… If we only paid attention to the mainstream media we would not get the idea that these problems are actually growing in Colombia, one year after the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC came into place. To get a better picture and understand how all these elements connect to US policy and corporate interests, we interviewed Daniel Kovalik, a lawyer and human rights activist who has long been involved in the struggle for peace and justice in Colombia.

  • IMF, World Bank, & Structural Adjustment

    IMF, World Bank, & structural adjustment

    IMF, World Bank, & Structural Adjustment

  • Robin D. G. Kelley

    What is racial capitalism and why does it matter?

    Talk by Robin D. G. Kelley on “What is Racial Capitalism and Why Does It Matter?” recorded November 7, 2017 at Kane Hall, University of Washington, Seattle, WA. Sponsored by the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities.

  • Labor market conundrum

    Nary a day goes by that President Trump and/or the talking heads on CNBC fail to mention the following unemployment chart as evidence that “everything is awesome” with the U.S. economy…

  • Latin America: 200 years of the infernal cycle of debt

    Latin America: 200 years of the infernal cycle of debt

    Venezuela is an emblematic case of the infernal cycle that Latin America has been struggling with over the last two centuries. It all began in 1810, when Simon Bolivar, a figurehead of the Spanish colonies in their fight for freedom, began borrowing from London in very unfavourable conditions to finance the wars of independence.

  • Social reproduction theory: What’s the big idea?

    Key to social reproduction theory (SRT) is an understanding of the ‘production of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated process’, or in other words: acknowledging that race and gender oppression occur capitalistically.
    In this article, Susan Ferguson, a contributor to Social Reproduction Theory, shows how SRT can deepen our understanding of everyday life under capitalism. She explores the history of this dialectical approach, its variances, and its potentialities; providing an answer to the question: social reproduction theory, what’s the big idea?