Subjects Archives: Political Economy

The Occupy movement forced the issue of economic inequality into American political discourse. The most common diagnosis, which comes from mainstream economics, is that inequality has risen over the last 40 years because technical change, notably computers and the Internet, has favored highly-educated workers and left lower-skilled workers behind.  The cure is to increase education […]

My voice is a crime, My thoughts anarchy, Because I do not sing to their tunes, I do not carry them on my shoulders. — Cherabandaraju, who was the lead accused in a “conspiracy case” involving poets and their poetry. It’s been two decades and a year since India’s elite embraced neo-liberalism.  Money — the […]

Bundestag Speech, 29 June 2012 Mr. President!  Dear colleagues! “Billions in taxes have been squandered.  Those who bear responsibility revealed themselves to be marionettes.  The part of the puppet master was performed by just the type of managers recently spoken of in loftier terms: investment bankers.” What the Handelsblatt wrote about the nationalization of the […]

Ammar Waqqaf is an independent Syrian political analyst based in England. Q: Why do you think the western powers are so keen to see regime change in Syria? A: Western powers would be fools not to exploit such an opportunity to turn a key regional player from an opposing side into an allied one.  Achieving […]

I would like to focus this interview on three distinct but related questions: your vision of the world and the possibilities of changing it; your conceptual and political proposal on the implosion of capitalism and delinking from it; your analysis of the global context, seen especially from Africa and the Middle East.  What is your […]

The German taxpayers should be happy to have SYRIZA in Greece, says economist Yanis Varoufakis in an interview.  Greece is not unwilling to reform.

ZEIT ONLINE: Mr. Varoufakis, the Greeks say they want to keep the euro but vote for SYRIZA and its leader Alexis Tsipras, whose plan could lead to an exit from the monetary union. How does that work?

Yanis Varoufakis: SYRIZA also wants Greece to remain in the eurozone. But, at the same time, it wants to renegotiate the austerity program, because it doesn’t work. Just about everyone who knows anything about economics knows that by now.

  On June 5th, roughly 1,334,450 people voted in favor of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his program of union busting, austerity, corporate tax-cuts, and property-tax freezes.  1,162,785, voted to recall the governor midway through his term.  Walker’s victory will be seized on by the Right as they drum up support for copycat union-busting bills […]

Alberto Montero Soler: First of all, I have to say that those effects would only manifest themselves in the medium term. To propose an exit from the euro as an immediate solution to the deterioration of living conditions of people would mean to deceive them. We are at a crossroads where peripheral economies can only choose between two evils.

Introduction The Greek crisis represents the deepening of a long systemic contradiction whose origins lie in the 1960s, in the stagnation of monopoly capitalism and the emergence of the South.  The industrial centers of the world economy were struck by a crisis of profitability, which was displaced outward in space and forward in time by […]

  The crisis is not relinquishing its grip on Europe.  From autumn 2008 to early 2009 the world market experienced the deepest slump in economic output since the Second World War.  This is a global crisis.  Even in emerging economies like China, Brazil, or India economic growth declined and could not compensate for the recession […]

Carlo Fanelli (CF): Your early work pays a great deal of attention to the classical political economists (e.g. Ricardo, Smith, J.B. Say, J.S. Mill, Marx, etc.), with later writings engaging with economic luminaries such as Alfred Marshal and John Maynard Keynes.  Could you briefly discuss how this research has influenced your thinking about economics?  And […]

I met Matan Kaminer in Tel Aviv in January 2012, and we agreed to do an extended interview about the state of the left in Israeli society after the controversial J14 social justice protests. Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?  How did you get involved in political activity? I was […]

The most demolishing article I have seen nowadays about Latin America was written by Renán Vega Cantor, full professor at the National Pedagogical University of Bogotá, which was published three days ago by the website ‘Rebelión’ under the title “Ecos de la Cumbre de las Américas” (Echoes of the Summit of the Americas). It is […]

After an engaging half-hour interview with India’s pre-eminent Marxist economist during a conference at New York University, I told a friend about my one-on-one time with Prabhat Patnaik. “There are Marxists in India?” came the bemused response.  “I thought India was the heart of the new capitalism.” Indeed, we hear about India mostly as a […]

Most Presidents preside over one or more capitalist downturns (recessions, depressions, crises, etc.).  Every President since at least FDR generated a “program” to respond to the downturn — as demanded by citizens and businesses.  FDR and every later President promised that his program would “not only extricate the US from the present economic troubles but […]

I was surprised today when I listened to the speech delivered by Jose Miguel Insulza in Cartagena. I thought that the person who was speaking on behalf of the OAS would at least claim some respect for the sovereignty of the peoples of this hemisphere which were for years colonized and cruelly exploited by colonial […]

The search for the political truth will always be a difficult task even in our times, when science has placed in our hands a huge amount of knowledge. One of the most important was the possibility to know and study the fabulous power of the energy contained in matter. The person who discovered that energy […]

  Spring 2012.  Merkel and Sarkozy rush from summit meeting to summit meeting, in order to save the euro.  The yellow press smears the people of Greece.  The struggle over a solution to the crisis is intensifying dramatically: by early 2013, an authoritarian-neoliberal alliance of business lobby groups, the financial industry, the EU Commission, the […]

Terror, political persecution, arbitrary detention, and militarization have long dominated Colombia.  State-mediated killings now run into the tens of thousands.  More than four million rural inhabitants have been displaced from sustenance-providing land.  In the face of seemingly endless suffering, however, there is now a better chance for peace in Colombia. Having recently announced that its […]

This Reflection could be written today, tomorrow or any other day without the risk of being mistaken. Our species faces new problems. When 20 years ago I stated at the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro that a species was in danger of extinction, I had fewer reasons than […]