Subjects Archives: Political Economy

It is not a difficult proposition to substantially reduce poverty through redistributive measures. About one tenth of India’s GDP would need to be devoted to providing adequate food for the population, basic and comprehensive healthcare, compulsory free education, employment guarantee and old age pension; for which additional taxation of 7 per cent of GDP that the rich and super-rich can easily bear, would be needed. Combined with vigorous implementation of the existing National Food Security Act 2013 and the MG National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, genuine large-scale reduction of poverty would result

The latest example is its pressing for release of John McCain pallbearer from Siberian jail while it ignores a socialist arrested by the Ukrainian intelligence services and another socialist who was murdered.

Behind the efforts of the powerful to unleash chaos against students protesting for Palestine.

Primitive accumulation is the historical process through which capitalists stole their wealth or took it by force. Canadian ecosocialist Ian Angus has contributed an excellent new book on this history, covering the violent transition from feudalism to capitalism in depth while demonstrating its continuing relevance to the modern world..

As the Occupy protests of 2011 exhausted themselves, a dramatic turn from protests to politics surfaced.

Grace Blakeley is a media star of the radical left-wing of the British labour movement. She is a columnist for the left-wing journal, Tribune, and a regular panellist on political debates in broadcasting—often the only spokesperson on the left advocating socialist alternatives.

What if it’s not us who are sick, asks Rod Tweedy, but a system at odds with who we are as social beings?

The paper’s author found that the five largest military contracts to major tech firms between 2018 and 2022 “had contract ceilings totaling at least $53 billion combined.”

Modern liberalism was developed in response to the Bolshevik Revolution during the capitalist crisis of the inter-war period, as a way of resolving that crisis, and other similar crises that could arise in future, without transcending capitalism.

The Groundwork Collaborative’s leader also said that “the Department of Justice should criminally prosecute Scott Sheffield,” the former Pioneer CEO whom the FTC blocked from joining ExxonMobil’s board.

A Cuban intellectual examines the consequences of the imperialist blockades on both Cuba and Venezuela.

Since the global financial crisis, big banks have taken a backseat, and asset managers have become the—often self-appointed—new experts and administrators of capitalism.

Money on the Left is joined by Grant Kester, professor of Art History at University of California, San Diego. We speak with Kester about his multi-decade career, researching and teaching the history of socially engaged art. 

Lean production, introduced in the 1980s from Japanese automakers, caught on in many U.S. industries.

The neoliberal years, it is generally agreed, have seen a sharp widening of income and wealth inequalities; in India it has even caused an increase in the extent of absolute deprivation.

In general, the discussion around diet today is a monotonous sermon.

The film Civil War addresses the paradox that the only way to stop polarisation is to take a side.

Russia is extremely unlikely to fall a third time for a Biden/NATO request to ‘freeze’ military operations and negotiate again.

Since the end of WW2, the imperialist bloc (IC) annually got around 1% of their GDP through the transfer of surplus value in international trade from the rest of the major ‘developing’ economies (DC) in the G20; while the latter lost about 1% of their GDP in surplus value transferred to the imperialist bloc. And these ratios were rising.

What the present moment reveals, once again, is that Western aggression during the “Cold War” was never about destroying socialism, as such. It was about destroying movements and governments in the periphery that sought economic sovereignty. Why? Because economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation in the core.